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Facebook and Instagram experienced a massive global outage this Friday, leaving thousands of users unable to access the Meta platforms, according to user reports and monitoring platforms recorded since the early hours of the morning.
The first reports began to be recorded around 9:44 AM in America and 2:36 PM BST in the United Kingdom, peaking at 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 old cached content without being able to show recent posts.
Of the users who reported issues with Instagram on Downdetector, 68% said they were having difficulties with the app, 12% were unable to log in, and 10% reported problems with the server connection.
The interruption also affected Threads and, according to some reports, WhatsApp, other platforms in the Meta ecosystem.
After the downfall, 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, along with memes.
"Meta crashed again," "let's go back to Fotolog," and "everything on Meta crashes just as I'm browsing my old Messenger conversations" were some of the reactions that circulated online.
At the closing of this note, Meta had not issued any official statement regarding the cause of the failure or provided an estimated time for the restoration of the service.
It's not the first time that Meta's platforms have collapsed on a global scale.
In March 2024, Facebook and Instagram experienced a worldwide outage of approximately two hours that disconnected users on a massive scale.
In December of that same year, another interruption was recorded that affected Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for a similar period.
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 such disruptions usually resolve within a few hours once the technical teams identify the problem, although Meta typically does not communicate the technical cause immediately.
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