A massive Meta outage locked users out of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads on Tuesday morning.
— Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all experiencing issues. The three Meta-owned platforms were not working for many users, with the widespread outage seeming to start around 10AM ET on Tuesday, March 5. Some users were experiencing issues logging in to their Meta Quest headsets, too. The outage was resolved within around two hours.
Facebook had been logging users out of their accounts, leaving them unable to get back in. Meanwhile, over on Instagram, some users, including several of us at Reeder Media, Inc., can’t refresh their feeds.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X Tuesday.
About an hour and a half after the outage reports started ticking up, fewer than 80,000 people were reporting issues with Facebook, according to Downdetector. Reports about Instagram and Messenger had also dropped sharply. Downdetector is a measure of only the users who report issues, so the real number of affected users is likely higher.
A similar Meta outage took place in 2021 when a configuration issue brought down access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours.
This time around, Threads is included and also appears to be completely down. When opening the app on a mobile device, it displays an error message that says, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” However, WhatsApp was working without an issue.
Reports on DownDetector rapidly spiked for all three platforms this morning, while global network trackers NetBlocks noted the issue is affecting multiple countries at once. Meta has yet to acknowledge the issue.
Just after noon ET, Meta said it had resolved the issue.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Stone said on X. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
