Facebook and Instagram down - updates: Meta gives reason for worldwide outage

Here’s some data, shared by Down Detector with The Independent, on the number of reports on the outage.

As you can see, it seems like the outage was all over in a couple of hours.

(Down Detector’s data is based on reports, not the number of people running into problems. That means that the real numbers are probably much, much higher.)

DogeDesigner, a Twitter/X account with links to Elon Musk, is continuing to mock Meta over the outage – more than half a day after it was fixed.

(In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg denied being a lizard.)

Meta doesn’t run an official status account, gave very little information about what was happening during the outage, and has said nothing more about what made it happen beyond blaming a “technical issue”.

That has led to frustration with some users – many of whom worried that they had been hacked because of the problems.

And that wasn’t only limited to Facebook. Users of the Meta Quest headset, which was also hit by an outage (see below), saw an error message that suggested there was something wrong with their kit, rather than a problem with the online services that power it.

Some users of Meta Quest virtual reality headsets experienced issues logging into their devices amid the global outage affecting Facebook, Instagram, and Threads yesterday, The Verge reported.

The outage likely prevented Horizon Worlds from functioning for some users, meaning metaverse was down.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience,” the Meta Quest official X account posted.

Tens of thousands of users reported outage of the Meta-owned social media platforms on Down Detector.

Amid the outage, Facebook users found they were logged out while Instagram did not work at all.

The platforms seem to have come back online after a nearly two-hour-long outage.

Taking note of yesterday’s global outage of Meta-owned platforms US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it did not observe any issues “out of the ordinary,” Axios first reported.

Tuesday was a big day in the US where 15 states elected delegates to decide which candidates would run for presidency.

Several users on social media raised concerns initially following the global outage affecting Facebook and Instagram that there may have been a cyberattack involved.

At a press briefing yesterday on election security, CISA said it was “aware of the incident and the global scope of it,” adding that malicious cyberactivity was likely not involved.

“We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage,” the US agency said.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a similar outage that lasted for nearly 6 hours in 2021 and impacted more than 3 billion users worldwide.

In a later blogpost, Facebook noted that the outage happened due to a mishap during a routine maintenance job.

The company said a command issued by its engineers during maintenance unintentionally took down all the connections in its network, “effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally”.

At the time Facebook said it would strengthen “testing, drills and overall resilience” to make sure such events happened “rarely as possible.”

Several employees at Meta who were unable to login to their internal work systems during the global outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Tuesday wondered if they were laid off, Reuters reported.

At its peak, the outage led to 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to Downdetector.com.

The issue was resolved on Tuesday but Meta has not revealed the exact cause behind the outage.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue...for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said.

Following the brief chaos Meta apologised to users and thanked them for their patience.

The Meta-owned platforms were temporarily down on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands of users reporting outages.

Hannah Cottrell has the full story here: