Facebook and Instagram, the popular social media platforms owned by Meta, were down for more than an hour on Tuesday evening, affecting thousands of users in India and other regions. Users reported log in issues, being logged out, and pages not loading on both platforms.
Users vent frustration on Twitter
According to Downdetector.com, a website that monitors outages, Facebook and Instagram were down from around 5:15 p.m. ET to 6:30 p.m. ET. The website recorded more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook, and more than 20,000 reports for Instagram. The outage affected users in India, the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and other regions.
Many users took to Twitter to express their frustration and share memes about the outage. The hashtags #facebookdown and #instagramdown were trending on the platform. Some users also joked about switching to other platforms, such as Snapchat, TikTok, or Telegram.
Facebook blames configuration change
Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp and Oculus, said that the outage was caused by a configuration change that impacted users globally. The company apologized for the inconvenience and said that it quickly investigated and resolved the issue.
Facebook did not provide any further details about the nature or scope of the configuration change. The company also did not disclose how many users were affected by the outage.
Facebook, Instagram down update
We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
Facebook faces frequent outages
This was not the first time that Facebook and its apps experienced an outage. In October 2021, Facebook suffered a massive outage that lasted for nearly six hours and affected millions of users worldwide. The outage was caused by a faulty configuration change that disrupted the communication between Facebook’s data centers.
The October outage was one of the worst in Facebook’s history, as it cost the company an estimated $160 million in lost revenue and damaged its reputation. The outage also sparked a congressional inquiry and a whistleblower complaint, as well as criticism from users, regulators, and competitors.
Facebook has also faced smaller outages in the past, such as in March 2021, when a technical issue caused a brief disruption for some users. The company has said that it is working to improve its infrastructure and reliability, as well as to prevent future outages.