Millions of users worldwide were unable to access their accounts on Friday due to a widespread outage on Facebook and Instagram, two social media platforms owned by Meta.
Many users reported that they were automatically logged out of their accounts as a result of the disruption to Facebook’s main website, mobile application, and Messenger service.
While visitors to Facebook’s website saw a notice stating that the company was working to resolve the issue, attempts to log back in were met with error messages stating that “an unexpected error occurred.”
Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was rapidly inundated with reports of the outage as users looked to the site to see if others were having similar issues.
The most impacted services were Facebook and Instagram, but WhatsApp seemed to be mostly up and running even though it shared some backend infrastructure with other Meta platforms. But some users also complained about having trouble getting onto Instagram’s website.
The outage seemed to be worldwide, as complaints quickly surfaced from several nations.
Before the website itself encountered technical issues, reports about Facebook and its products sharply increased, according to Downdetector, a platform that monitors service interruptions.
As of the time this report was filed, Meta had not yet released an official statement regarding the reason behind the outage.
Although it maintains a public status page for business services, which has not been updated to reflect the disruption, the company does not run one for its consumer-facing platforms.
