Social media mogul Meta experienced a major worldwide outage, leaving millions of users unable to send messages, scroll their feeds, and post content. The global disruption appeared on March 20, between 10:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time in the US, although it hit parts of the UK, Europe, and Asia, affecting many nations.
During the outage on Facebook, users were notified about expired sessions or account suspensions, prompting them to log back into their accounts. Messenger users were reported as unavailable, and others couldn’t respond or send messages. Since the whole of Meta was disrupted, Instagram users also found issues posting comments, sending DMs, and scrolling their home feeds.
Online services interruptions tracker DownDetector quickly reported the platform-wide disruption and the issues users faced while using the apps. The root cause of the global outage remains unknown, but it happened 15 days after a previous Meta outage caused by internal issues.
Multiple users reported to DownDetector that Facebook experienced the most severe issues, unlike Instagram and Messenger. Over 67 percent of reports are associated with Facebook, 66 percent with Instagram, and 61 percent with Messenger.
Additionally, DownDetector received over 550,000 reports for Facebook disruptions and 92,000 for Instagram. All these figures were reported during the peak of the outage.
The outage wasn’t the first time Facebook and Messenger went through issues, compelling its users to flock to Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) to unload their Meta-related frustrations and check whether or not others are experiencing the same issues. Many users sought information and solutions on search engines like Google and Bing. They felt a surge of relief upon discovering that the outage affected millions of users, not just themselves.
The hashtags #Facebookdown and #Instagramdown trended on Twitter, sparking a stream of scammers claiming to be able to solve the problem and help users regain their accounts. On the brighter side, others simply poked fun at the incident by creating hilarious memes centered on the apps, users, and Mark Zuckerberg.
The White House National Security Council spokesperson claimed that the proper authorities monitored the incident and discovered no malicious cyber activities and threats.
While the outage did not last more than 5 hours, it happened long enough to worry many people, especially those managing business and professional accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta may not have released an official statement on what caused the global outage. Still, its spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted on X, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted.”
Facebook is the most-used social media application, with over 2 billion monthly active users. The app’s technical issues and outages do not stop it from becoming the number-one platform in the world.
Fortunately, the outage was brief and did not result in any harm or damage to its users’ privacy and accounts. However, a more stable Meta platform in the future would provide greater reassurance to users.