Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage on Friday, leaving millions of users worldwide unable to access their accounts for some time.
The disruption affected Facebook’s website, mobile application and Messenger service, with many users reporting that they were unexpectedly logged out of their accounts.
Attempts to log back in were met with error messages stating that “an unexpected error occurred,” while visitors to Facebook’s website were shown a notice indicating that the company was working to resolve the issue.
As the outage spread, users flocked to X, formerly known as Twitter, to confirm whether others were experiencing similar problems and to share updates about the disruption.
While Facebook and Instagram appeared to bear the brunt of the outage, WhatsApp remained largely operational despite sharing some backend infrastructure with other Meta platforms. However, a number of users also reported difficulties accessing Instagram’s website.
The outage appeared to have a global impact, with complaints emerging from multiple countries within a short period, suggesting that the disruption was not limited to any particular region.
Data from Downdetector showed a sharp surge in reports related to Facebook and other Meta services as users scrambled to report issues. The platform itself later experienced technical difficulties amid the influx of complaints.
As of the time of filing this report, Meta had not issued an official statement explaining the cause of the outage.
The technology giant does not maintain a public status page for its consumer-facing platforms, although it operates one for business services. The page had not been updated to reflect the disruption at the time of reporting
