Facebook and Instagram Global Outage

This article was last updated on March 6, 2024

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Unprecedented Login Issues Reported

Facebook and Instagram, two of the leading social media platforms, underwent a massive global outage that lasted for a time span of approximately an hour. Unprecedented errors emerged, as users found themselves unexpectedly logged out of their Facebook accounts. The catchphrase which echoed across the worldwide user base was “something went wrong”, preventing the loading of stories. Parallelly, Instagram was also affected with users reporting being unable to display new posts.

Crash Timeline and Probable Causes

The unexpected crash took its toll around 4 p.m. and despite the situation easing up considerably now, there remains an aura of mystery surrounding the actual reasons behind the problem. Netblocks, an independent online watchdog service based out of the UK, has clarified that the issue did not arise from any form of internet outage or country-specific filtering. Thus, it discounts the possibility of governmental interference leading to this disruption. While many authoritarian governments have been known to regulate or entirely block access to such platforms or even the internet, this global outage bears no link with such scenarios.

Staggering User Complaints Logged

Allestoringen.nl, a Dutch website specialising in reporting website malfunctions, marked the peak of the impact at around 4:30 p.m., logging in an overwhelming 90,000 reports. Meanwhile, its US counterpart recorded a whopping 490,000 reports near the same timeframe. However, the surge then saw a fall after 5 p.m., with report numbers decreasing considerably. By 6 p.m., Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, confirmed that all systems had undergone restoration, signaling an impending cessation of the issue. To provide context to its severity, the issue mirrored a large-scale disruption that the company suffered in the previous year that lasted for approximately six hours. However, this time, Threads, Meta’s alternative to X, was affected too. Fortunately, WhatsApp, another platform under the tech giant, was unscathed.

Ammusing Social Media Responses to the Disruption

The inconvenience spurred a race amongst various platforms to leverage this situation. “We know why you’re all here now.” became a quote famously attributed to X. In the midst of this chaos, Gmail, a product of concurrent parent company Alphabet, also experienced a minor outage. Users received higher than usual error messages between 4:20 PM and 5:00 PM, leading to increased durations in sending and receiving messages.