Facebook, Instagram Experience Widespread Outage – What We Know

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Millions of Facebook users woke up Tuesday morning (March 5) to find that they had been logged out of their accounts and were unable to log in.

Here is what we know…

Which sites are affected by the outage?

It appears that the majority of the sites operated by Meta have been affected. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp.

When did the Facebook and Instagram outages occur?

Users started reported problems aroudn 10 a.m. EST Tuesday, March 5.

How many people were affected by the outage?

Comments on Downdetector.com indicate that the platforms are down across the United States as well as Australia, Hungary, Thailand, Vietnam and more. More than 500,000 users reported issues on Downdetector, but the number of people affected is likely significantly higher since it appears that the issue affected the entire platform. Instagram alone has approximately 1 billion active monthly users, while Facebook boasts more than 3 billion.

What caused the Facebook outage?

Meta hasn’t disclosed what caused the massive service interruption. But, the platform acknowledged the issues on their website, saying, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Has a widespread outage happened before?

In early October 2021, Facebook and all of its sister sites experienced a massive outage that lasted for more than five hours. Unlike Tuesday’s outage, the 2021 crash resulted in Facebook disappearing from the internet entirely.

Facebook reported at the time that “changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers. That interrupted communications and cascaded to other data centers, bringing our services to a halt.” It is likely that a similar issue caused the March 2024 crash, but Facebook has yet to reveal the cause.

As of 12 p.m. EST, Facebook was slowly recovering as users were slowly regaining access to the platform.