On Tuesday (5 March), Facebook and Instagram experienced a more than two-hour downtime due to a technical problem, affecting a significant number of global users.
The disruptions began around 10am ET (11pm Malaysia time), leading many users to report being logged out of Facebook and Instagram on rival social media platform X, saying they’re facing difficulties in logging back in, according to Reuters.
At its peak, there were over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram, as per the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X that the outage was caused by a “technical issue” without going into details.
Meta, with a total of 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads, also encountered issues with the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business, as indicated on its status dashboard.
While WhatsApp and Threads experienced a comparatively smaller outage, according to Downdetector, Meta employees anonymously shared on the messaging app Blind that they were unable to access their internal work systems during the downtime, causing concerns about potential layoffs.
