Millions of users across the world experienced disruptions on Friday after Meta-owned social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, suffered a widespread outage.
The incident affected Facebook’s website, mobile app, and Messenger service, with many users unexpectedly logged out of their accounts.
Users attempting to regain access were met with error notifications stating that an unexpected issue had occurred. Visitors to Facebook’s website were also shown a message indicating that the company was working to fix the problem.
As the disruption continued, many affected users turned to X, formerly known as Twitter, to confirm whether others were facing similar difficulties.
Although Facebook and Instagram appeared to bear the brunt of the outage, WhatsApp remained largely functional despite operating within Meta’s broader infrastructure. Some Instagram users, however, reported difficulty accessing the platform’s web version.
Reports of the outage surfaced from several countries almost simultaneously, suggesting the issue had a global impact.
Service monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints linked to Facebook and related services before it also encountered technical issues.
As of the time this report was filed, Meta had not released an official explanation for the disruption.
The company currently does not maintain a public status page for its consumer platforms, although its business services status page had not reflected the outage.
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