Meta’s Facebook and Instagram faced a widespread outage on Tuesday, March 5, affecting thousands of users, as reported by the outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Threads were completely down globally, and some users reported issues with WhatsApp on the X platform. Many reported being automatically logged out of their accounts.
The incident prompted a surge of frustration among users, with over 300,000 reports of outages flooding in for Facebook, in addition to 47,000 reports for Instagram. Andy Stone, Communications Director at Meta, took to X (formerly Twitter) to assure users that the company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, is actively addressing the issue.
Amid the outage, hashtags related to cyber attacks are trending wildly on X platform. Speculations arise that Meta’s servers might have been hacked. However, media reports indicate technical issues, with efforts underway to resolve them promptly. Nonetheless, this situation has left billions of users frustrated.
Seizing the moment, X (Formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk humorously remarked on the outage via his platform, saying, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
However, after two hours, many users reported that they were able to log in to their Facebook accounts, but they were still unable to use Instagram and Threads.
This outage echoes a similar incident in 2021 when a configuration issue rendered Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp inaccessible for several hours.
