WASHINGTON: On Tuesday, Meta experienced an extremely rare outage affecting all of its social media platforms. Users of Threads, Facebook, and Instagram were unable to access their accounts for a number of hours.
Internet watcher Netblocks said that problems with login sessions were occurring on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger across several nations.
Together with WhatsApp and Threads, Meta’s app family boasts 3.19 billion daily active users.
Prior to this, the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also having problems, according to its status dashboard.
But according to Downdetector, which analyzes outages by compiling status data from several sources, including users, the downtime for WhatsApp and Threads was significantly smaller.
The interruptions lasted for around two hours, beginning at 8:00 p.m. Pakistan time (1500 GMT).
As per the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, during the peak of the outage, over 550,000 reports of interruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram were received.
A technical problem earlier today made it impossible for certain users to access some of our services. Without going into any detail, Meta spokesman Andy Stone stated in a post on X, “We resolved the issue… for everyone who was impacted.”
Facebook’s status page for advertisers stated at the height of the incident on Tuesday that there were “major disruptions” to the site and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
When attempting to log into Facebook, users were prompted to do so but were unable to do so with the correct password. Users using mobile devices were not seeing their feeds refreshed on Instagram.
According to reports, customers were unable to log in to Meta’s virtual reality headsets due to issues with the device’s Horizon World platform.
Users were locked out of the Meta sites, which resulted in an increase in activity on X, formerly Twitter.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, took a swipe at Meta in a tweet that stated, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” The outage was one of the most popular topics trending on X.
A jab at its competitor, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote, “Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here.”
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council, which was also keeping an eye on the situation, stated that it was not aware of any particular harmful cyber activity.
