Published on: March 5, 2024
A massive outage at Meta on Tuesday morning has locked users out of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, all owned by Meta, are currently facing operational issues. The widespread outage, affecting numerous users, began around 10 a.m. ET. Additionally, some users are encountering login problems with their Meta Quest headsets.
On Facebook, users are reporting being logged out of their accounts (I got a “Session Expired” message on my account) and are unable to log back into them. Other apps and websites owned by Meta don’t work as usual either. For example, Instagram users are saying the app won’t open or is stuck on the last active session.
Threads is also down, displaying an error message on mobile devices that reads, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” Meanwhile, WhatsApp appears to be functioning without any issues.
Meta has acknowledged the issue on its status page at 10:17AM ET.
“We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” the message reads.
The company’s communications head Andy Stone confirmed that there’s a problem, tweeting on X that Meta is “aware people are having trouble accessing our services,” and that they’re “working on this now.”
DownDetector, a website that tracks user reports of internet disruptions, reported more than 461,000 outages at 10:37 a.m., though this number has since decreased. Instagram saw over 25,000 reported outages at 10:51 a.m., reaching a peak with over 70,000 users affected at one point.
The last time Meta (then Facebook) saw a significant outage was in 2021 when it took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline for over six hours. The company then attributed the outage to “configuration changes on backbone routers.”