Major Disruption Affects Facebook; Outage Now Resolved

The logo of the social network Facebook on a broken screen of a mobile phone on May 16, 2018. Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

After tens of thousands of users of Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta-owned products reported that those social media websites and apps were down Tuesday, Facebook said hours later that the issue was resolved.

At around 12 p.m. ET, a Facebook spokesman wrote on X: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The disruptions started around 10:00 a.m. ET as more than 500,000 people made reports of outages affecting Facebook and some 40,000 users reported the same on Instagram, according to tracking website DownDetector. The website only posts data about outage reports, while the actual number is likely quite larger.

Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues, some reporters said. There were around 200 reports of outages for Meta-owned WhatsApp on Downdetector, which also tracks outages by collating status reports from other sources.

Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, also was down for many, according to the site. “Something went wrong, please try again later,” the site said in a message.

On X, a large number of users made reference to the Facebook outage. Multiple topics connected to the issue were trending on the social media website.

In a post on his website, X owner Elon Musk appeared to target Facebook’s outage: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

It’s not uncommon for Facebook and other Meta properties to go down. In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than seven hours, and it was blamed on the loss of IP routes and Domain Name System (DNS) servers, according to reports at the time.

An estimate from Forbes magazine at the time suggested that Facebook lost about $65 million.

It comes several weeks after an outage impacted AT&T and Cricket customers, who similarly reported service disruptions across the United States. Many people couldn’t send text messages, make phone calls, or use other services, including calling emergency services.

That outage lasted for about 12 hours, AT&T said.

AT&T later confirmed that the outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack, instead blaming the problem on an internal issue. However, some U.S. lawmakers warned that U.S. infrastructure is vulnerable to similar attacks and that Chinese state actors could do worse damage if they targeted critical systems.

Meta hasn’t yet commented on the cause of Tuesday’s outage. Its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, also has not released a public comment.

Reuters contributed to this report.