Facebook and Instagram, both under the umbrella of Meta, experienced a widespread outage lasting over two hours, impacting users across the globe. The disruption, which began around 10 a.m. ET (15:00 GMT), prevented users from logging in and accessing the popular social media platforms.

During the outage, more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram were documented, highlighting the scale of the issue.

Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn

The White House National Security Council kept a close eye on the incident but reported no specific indications of malicious cyber activity.

Despite the significant inconvenience caused by the outage, Meta quickly addressed the technical problem.

In a statement on X, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating that earlier today, a technical issue had led to difficulties for users in accessing some of their services. However, the company did not provide detailed information about the nature of the technical glitch.

Meta, which saw its shares dip by 1.2% during the outage, has a vast user base of around 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads.

While the outage primarily affected Facebook and Instagram, the status dashboard indicated issues with the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business.

Why does it matter?

The incident drew attention on social media platforms, with Meta employees expressing concerns on Blind, an anonymous messaging app, about being unable to log into internal work systems during the outage. The widespread disruption fueled discussions about the dependence on major platforms and the need for robust technical infrastructures to prevent such occurrences in the future.