Facebook and Instagram Experience Global Outage, Affecting Hundreds of Thousands of Users, Restored Within 2 Hours

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On March 6th, reports emerged that Meta Platforms’ Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Threads experienced service disruptions, leaving hundreds of thousands of users worldwide unable to access these services. Here are the main details of the incident:

Service Disruption Details: Over 500,000 users reported a Facebook service disruption, with approximately 77,000 Instagram users and 12,000 Messenger users also experiencing outages. The issues mainly occurred after 10 AM Eastern Time, lasting for about an hour.

Global Impact: In addition to the United States, users in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico also reported service disruptions. Meta’s advertising and developer platforms were affected as well.

Meta’s Response: Meta issued a statement saying that the service disruption issues on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads had been resolved, offering solutions to users who had been unable to log in for several hours.

Communications Director’s Statement: Meta’s Communications Director Andy Stone stated in a post that technical issues made it difficult for some users to access services, and the problems were quickly resolved, apologizing to the affected users.

Impact on Other Social Platforms: DownDetector received over 300,000 reports of Facebook outages, and the WhatsApp Business application programming interface also encountered problems. WhatsApp and Threads experienced minor disruptions.

Employee Reaction: Meta employees expressed on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log into internal work systems, sparking speculation about potential layoffs.

Elon Musk’s Response: Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), commented in a post that if you’re reading this, it’s because our servers are up and running.

The outage caused widespread inability to access Meta’s social platforms globally. Meta has addressed the issue and issued an apology, with relevant departments closely monitoring the situation’s development.