Meta has announced the restoration of its Facebook and Instagram services following a widespread outage reported by over half a million users being unable to log in to the social media platforms and experiencing disruptions on Tuesday.
A technical glitch caused widespread login issues affecting Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger services for several hours.
Meta Addressing the Widespread Outage
DownDetector, an internet service outage monitoring site, indicated receiving over 500,000 problem reports from U.S. Facebook users and over 70,000 Instagram users as of 10:30 a.m. ET, which common issues mainly were related to logging into the Facebook app and encountering problems with the Instagram app.
Meta's head of communications, Andy Stone, acknowledged the problems and stated on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the company addressed the issue promptly for all affected users and apologized for the inconvenience.
Fears of Social Media Hacking
DownDetector noted that users worldwide, from Egypt to Oklahoma, reported difficulties logging into Facebook. Concerns about potential account hacking have surfaced on social media as individuals were unexpectedly logged out of the service and unable to regain access using their passwords.
Users also experienced account lockouts and feed refreshing issues, which impacted Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta Quest's VR headsets also experienced sign-out issues, while WhatsApp remained unaffected, according to Tech site 9to5Mac.
A Major Outage Unrelated to Cyberactivities
A senior official from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency informed reporters on Tuesday that the agency was not aware of any election nor any specific malicious cyberactivity related to the outage.
According to Netblocks' post on X, a London-based internet monitoring firm, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads experienced outages related to login sessions in multiple countries. Still, they clarified that there were no indications of government-imposed country-level internet disruptions or filtering.
Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, described the problem as a "major outage incident" on X, where Meta's official status page even displayed "Unknown" status for all services.
Meta's Preparation for The European Union's Digital Markets Act
The outage occurs shortly before the Thursday deadline for major tech firms to adhere to the European Union's new Digital Markets Act. Meta is adjusting its operations to comply, such as permitting users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts to prevent the amalgamation of personal data for targeted online advertisements. It remains uncertain if the outage is linked to any adjustments Meta may implement in preparation for the DMA.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced hours-long outages, which the company attributed to faulty changes in routers responsible for coordinating network traffic between its data centers. The following year, WhatsApp encountered another brief outage.
Meta reports that Facebook boasts over 2 billion daily active users globally.
