Numerous users reported experiencing difficulties accessing the social media platforms on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands of people reporting significant technical issues spanning over two hours throughout Meta’s suite of apps, which includes Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook users reported issues, such as being logged out and, upon attempting to log back in, seeing an error message such as “Something went wrong,” Please try again.” On Tuesday, March 5, at 10:25 a.m. ET, error reports increased, according to monitoring service Downdetector. Downdetector had received over 500,000 mistake complaints as of around 10:40 a.m. Approximately 76% of Facebook users reported issues with difficulty logging in.
Moreover, Instagram users complained that they couldn’t upload anything to the app and that their feed wasn’t refreshing. The outage affected the company’s Twitter-like app, Threads, and Meta’s messaging platform. Threads was released last year.
The Facebook Login Status website announced “major disruptions”. It said, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login” in a notice sent out at 10:17 a.m. ET. Our technical teams are working hard to find a fast solution to the problem. The page indicated that the Facebook Login services “are in the process of being restored” in an update at 12:07 p.m. We sincerely regret any inconvenience that this may have caused.
The company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible” following a “technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” according to Meta spokesman Andy Stone at 12:19 p.m.
The owner of X and multibillionaire tech magnate Elon Musk used the outage to mock his more established rival on social media. He posted on X, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are operating.” “We know why you’re all here right now,” the platform’s primary @X account tweeted shortly before 11 a.m. ET.
Similar multiple-service outages occurred at Meta in October 2021. Causing Facebook, Instagram, and other apps to go offline for roughly six hours. A company executive attributed The issues at the time to “a faulty configuration change” on the backbone routers, which manage network traffic between its data centres. That was Facebook’s longest outage since March 2019, when several apps experienced a roughly 24-hour outage.
