Facebook and Instagram suffered widespread outages for hours on Friday afternoon before the Meta-owned platforms came back online.
Downdetector, the online outage tracking website, indicated that more than 100,000 people were having problems logging in to Facebook as of Friday afternoon. It also showed more than 9,000 users reporting problems with Instagram and nearly 20,000 with Facebook Messenger.
Users across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East also reported being logged out of their profiles, greeted by blank feeds, or met with repeated “unexpected error” and “query error” messages.
The NewsMatrics noticed the error messages on Friday afternoon before the situation was clarified by Meta.
Andy Stone, Meta spokesperson, had taken to X to reveal that the company is “aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services,” adding that Meta is “working on it”.
In a follow-up post, Stone said: “We’re coming back, though it may take a bit of time for everything to be fully back to normal”.
The disruption marks the latest in a series of intermittent outages affecting Meta’s family of apps in recent years.
