March 6, 2024
SINGAPORE – Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up late on March 5, after an outage that lasted over two hours and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.
The disruptions started at around 10pm Singapore time (10am Eastern US time), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in, according to Reuters.
A deluge of reports to outage tracking website Downdetector cited problems with Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Threads, who are part of Meta’s family of apps.
As at 11.29pm, there were 13,083 local reports of problems with Facebook, with 75 per cent of the respondents reporting login issues.
While Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Threads were also disrupted, they were far less affected than Facebook. Facebook Messenger had 175 reports at 11.32pm, while Instagram had more than 4,000. Threads, a text-based app also run by Meta, had 867 local reports on Downdetector as at 11.24pm.
A search on social media platform X showed that #facebookdown was a fast-rising hashtag, with more than 73,000 posts, as people brought up how they thought they had been hacked after they were logged out of their Facebook accounts.
In a post on X, Meta spokesman Andy Stone attributed the outage to a technical issue but did not elaborate on its nature. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” he added.
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According to metastatus.com, operated by Meta to track the status and outages of its business products, there were “major disruptions” to the Meta Admin Centre, Facebook login, WhatsApp business API (Application Programming Interface) and marketing API.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, according to Reuters, with the platform’s owner, Mr Elon Musk, taking a potshot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.
Meta products were hit with an outage in 2021 that took its services offline for hours. The social media giant later said it was due to a single wrong command used during maintenance.
“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally,” said Mr Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering and infrastructure, then.