Meta’s family of apps including Facebook and Instagram experienced widespread technical problems lasting more than two hours Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands of users logging errors in accessing the social media services.
Users reported problems including being logged out of Facebook — and when they attempted to log back in, were shown an error message such as, “Something went wrong. Please try again.” According to monitoring service Downdetector, error reports spiked about 10:25 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5. As of approximately 10:40 a.m., Downdetector had received more than 500,000 error reports. About 76% of the problems reported by Facebook users related to trouble logging in.
In addition, Instagram users reported that their feed was not refreshing and that they were unable to post anything to the platform. The outage also extended to Meta’s Messaging platform and Threads, the company’s Twitter-like app launched last year.
In an alert at 10:17 a.m. ET, the Facebook Login Status page reported “major disruptions,” with the following message: “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” In an update at 12:07 p.m., the page said the Facebook Login services “are in the process of being restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.”
At 12:19 p.m., Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company had “resolved the issue as quickly as possible” after a “technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.”
Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire tech tycoon who owns X, took the opportunity to troll his larger social media rival for the outage. “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” he wrote on X. Just before 11 a.m. ET, the main @X account on the platform subtweeted, “we know why you’re all here rn.”
In October 2021, Meta (back when the company was still called Facebook) had a similar multiple-service outage, during which Facebook, Instagram and other apps went down for about six hours. A company exec at the time blamed the problems on “a faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic among its data centers. That was the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service was down for about 24 hours across multiple apps.***
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