A worldwide outage has affected Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, leaving countless users unable to access these popular social media platforms
According to a source within Facebook, the company's internal systems were also down, possibly contributing to the outage.
The problems emerged around 10:20 am ET and are impacting all the apps and websites associated with these social media sites.
DownDetector, an online outage monitoring service, indicates that hundreds of thousands of Americans are experiencing issues with Facebook, while tens of thousands are reporting problems with Instagram. The number of issue reports for Messenger is in the thousands.
The outage is not limited to the US but has also affected the UK, parts of Europe, China, Australia, and Mexico.
Users have been experiencing various problems, such as being logged out of their accounts and unable to log back in despite using the correct credentials. Additionally, Instagram's News Feed is displaying an error message. DownDetector's outage map highlights affected areas, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, and major cities in California.
The majority of issue reports attribute the problems to the apps themselves, with Facebook at 72%, Instagram at 64%, and Messenger at 50%. Frustrated users have turned to Elon Musk's X platform to express their frustrations and inquire if others are facing similar issues.
Initially, some users suspected their accounts had been hacked, but there have been over 80,000 posts on X discussing the Facebook and Instagram outage.
Elon Musk responded to the Meta outage with a post on X, stating, "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working."
Meta's service dashboard, which lists its services, has shown significant disruptions for certain features but has then transitioned to displaying "Unknown" or becoming entirely blank.
