Instagram and Facebook which are meta-owned platforms experienced a widespread outage across the globe and faced a more than two-hour outage due to a technical glitch on Tuesday.
Users complained about login issues on both of these social media platforms. Some were logged out of both Instagram and Facebook. Some were unable to refresh the Instagram page. Soon after, YouTube too joined the party and netizens started facing similar kinds of issues.
The disruptions started around 8:30 pm with messages like “Login again; session expired; couldn’t refresh feed,” popping up using Facebook and Instagram apps. A spokesperson said that the White House National Security Council was monitoring the incident and was not aware of any suspicious or improper cyber activities.
What impact did the Outage had on Meta Users?
Downdetector.com website which tracks the outages also revealed that both the platforms were down for ten thousands of users on Tuesday. There were more than 3,00,000 reports of outages for Facebook while Instagram got reports from more than 20,000 users according to the Downdetector which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.
Also Meta’s status dashboard showed that WhatsApp Business’s application programming interface also faced these issues. Downdetector tracked about 200 reports for WhatsApp Outage .
However, services restored around 10pm on Tuesday.
Meta reacts on Rival platform X
“We’re aware people are facing trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta Spokesperson Andy Stone said in his post on X.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologized for any inconvenience.” Stone apologized and tweeted after the services were restored.
Elon Musk owner of X (formerly Twitter) was spontaneous in taking a sarcastic counter reply saying, “if you are reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
Not even X has been exempted from such app crash . X has faced multiple disruptions to its service after $44 Billion purchase of the Social Media platform in October 2022 by Musk with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the U.S. to France.
Netizens started circulating various memes and jokes on X when they came to vent out their boredom on X when Instagram and Facebook went down. Even when these meta apps were restored the netizens made various sarcastic jokes revolving around this.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/PcxndHZZqh
— DivaPatriot 🇺🇸 (@TeamAmerica2020) March 5, 2024
Surprisingly once in 2021, the outage lasted hours for social media like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp reportedly cost the company around $65 million in revenue.
