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A massive outage has hit Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Users were unable to access the apps or websites as usual. Some Facebook users were logged out and could not log back in, while Instagram was completely down.
Meta has not provided any official information about the outage on its status pages or social media accounts. However, Down Detector, a website that tracks online service issues, reported widespread outages for Instagram, Facebook and Messenger on Thursday. The outages affected users around the world, indicating a global problem.
Instead of showing a skeleton version of the site, Facebook will automatically log you out. An error message will appear saying that your login has expired, and if you try to log back in, the system will reject your credentials.
Why Instagram and Facebook are down globally?
Meta’s status page for its business products, such as Facebook and Instagram ads, showed that they were operating normally.
Several users have taken to Twitter to report an outage on these platforms. At the time of writing this article, all three services were showing a refreshing error. While WhatsApp isn't sending or receiving messages, Instagram shows "couldn't refresh the feed." Similarly, the Facebook page takes forever to load.
According to DownDetector, social media giants Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are in a global outage. Social media users trying to access Facebook received a message that read: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on this and will fix it as soon as possible."
The outage is causing concern among businesses that rely on Facebook for marketing, which highlights the platform's significant role in global communication. Users are migrating to other social networks to voice their frustrations and seek updates, making #FacebookDown trend.
A Downdetector user writes, “Messenger and Facebook logged me out a few minutes ago. I logged back in successfully, but it kicked me out after one second. Now, I can't log back in. I reported the issue when there were only 40 reports, but now there are over 5000, so it appears Facebook is experiencing some issues now.”
The outage is also affecting Instagram as well as Messenger. Threads too. Anyway, no need to change your password (yet). You’re not being phished.
It’s a Meta service disruption. Even Meta Quest headsets are signed out which prevents Horizon Worlds from functioning. In other words, the metaverse is down.
Outages are a "big deal
The company often remains secretive about the causes of any issues and doesn't tend to explain them even after fixing them. For example, in 2019, it suffered its biggest outage in years - and only said it had "triggered a problem" during "routine maintenance tasks".
In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg noted that such outages are a "big deal". Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, and noted that it can take "months" to win back trust and get people back on Facebook's platform — if they do come back.
DownDetector only tracks outages on its platform by combining status reports from a range of sources, including user-submitted errors. An outage can affect a significant number of users. Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
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