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Facebook and Instagram experienced a massive global outage this Friday, leaving thousands of users unable to access the platforms of Meta, according to user reports and monitoring platforms collected since early this morning.
The first reports began to be recorded around 9:44 AM in the Americas and 2:36 PM BST in the United Kingdom, with a peak of over 104,000 reports on Downdetector, compared to a usual baseline of just 11.
The issues affected both the web version and the mobile application of both platforms, with users unable to log in, feeds that wouldn't load, and direct messages that couldn't be sent.
On desktop, Instagram only displayed the error message “Sorry, this page isn't available”, while the mobile version of Facebook only loaded cached old content without being able to show recent posts.
Of the users who reported issues with Instagram on Downdetector, 68% said they were experiencing difficulties with the app, 12% couldn't log in, and 10% reported issues with the server connection.
The interruption also affected Threads and, according to some reports, WhatsApp, other platforms within the Meta ecosystem.
In response to the outage, users temporarily migrated to X and TikTok to stay informed.
WhatsApp and Telegram served as messaging alternatives for those who were able to access them.
In X, comments have quickly multiplied, as have the memes.
"Meta crashed again," "let's go back to Fotolog," and "everything on Meta seems to crash just when I'm snooping through my old Messenger conversations" were some of the reactions that circulated on the network.
At the close of this note, Meta had not issued any official statement regarding the source of the outage nor provided an estimated time for restoring the service.
This is not the first time that Meta's platforms have collapsed on a global scale.
In March 2024, Facebook and Instagram experienced a global outage of approximately two hours that disconnected users en masse.
In December of that same year, another outage was reported affecting Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for a similar duration.
The most serious incident occurred on October 4, 2021, when all of Meta's platforms were inaccessible for nearly seven hours due to a configuration error in the company's backbone network, which rendered its DNS servers unreachable from the internet, with an estimated cost of $100 million in lost revenue.
The historical pattern indicates that this type of disruption typically resolves in a few hours once the technical teams identify the issue, although Meta usually does not communicate the technical cause immediately.
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