Facebook and Instagram Experience Outages Across Several Countries

Early Sunday morning, many Facebook users faced issues accessing the social media platform, receiving a message that their accounts were ‘temporarily unavailable.’ According to Downdetector, a live outage monitoring service, the problems began around 3:25 a.m. ET, impacting thousands of users in the United States and other countries.

Users in Canada, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom, and across Europe also reported experiencing similar access issues. Reports indicated that while Facebook seemed to be operating on mobile devices, desktop browser access was problematic. Downdetector revealed that 63 percent of these reports were about website issues, 20 percent concerning mobile devices, and 10 percent related to the app.

On Reddit, some users shared their experiences, revealing they initially received error messages like ‘You’ve been temporarily banned,’ and were later redirected to generic error pages. Others reported seeing messages about being temporarily blocked for ‘going too fast and overusing,’ as users attempted to refresh pages to check if the platform was functioning.

Instagram users reported growing numbers of issues as well. Downdetector reported that 44 percent of issues were related to the Feed or Timeline, 40 percent involved the app itself, and 12 percent concerned posting or publishing content. Users experienced challenges with loading feeds, sending messages, and viewing stories, along with receiving error notifications and server connection problems.

WhatsApp also showed signs of issues, although on a smaller scale compared to Facebook and Instagram. Reports on Downdetector indicate that 44 percent of issues were related to messaging, 39 percent to the app, and 8 percent to login problems. The volume of WhatsApp reports was less compared to Facebook, suggesting the disruption was more contained.

Meta, the parent company of these platforms, has faced several notable service disruptions over the years. In October 2021, a significant six-hour global outage occurred, impacting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. This was due to a faulty configuration change to the network infrastructure.

In March 2024, a similar widespread outage affected Facebook and Instagram significantly, while also impacting Threads and WhatsApp to a lesser extent. Users were unexpectedly logged out and could not sign back in, and Instagram feeds failed to refresh. Meta stated this disruption was technical but did not elaborate on specifics.

Christine Harrison, a digital designer, noted that analysts suspect the recent outage might stem from a problem during a major system update. Some regions were notified of the planned update earlier that morning, making it likely that a glitch during the update caused the access problems. However, Meta has not officially confirmed this as the cause.

Meta has yet to provide details about the cause or an estimated resolution time. Newsweek reached out to Meta for comments on the issues affecting Facebook and Instagram, and whether they have pinpointed the cause.