Facebook, Instagram Suffer Global Outage, Millions Unable to Access Accounts

Meta-owned social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, experienced a widespread outage on Friday, leaving millions of users worldwide unable to access their accounts.

The disruption affected Facebook’s website, mobile application and Messenger service, with many users reporting that they were unexpectedly logged out. Attempts to sign back in reportedly resulted in error messages stating that “an unexpected error occurred.”

Visitors to Facebook’s website were also greeted with a notice indicating that the company was working to resolve the issue.

As reports of the outage spread, users flocked to X (formerly Twitter) to verify whether others were experiencing similar problems.

While Facebook and Instagram appeared to be the hardest hit, WhatsApp remained largely functional despite sharing some backend infrastructure with other Meta services. However, a number of users also reported difficulties accessing Instagram through its web platform

The outage appeared to have a global impact, with complaints emerging from multiple countries within a short period.

Monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a significant spike in reports related to Facebook and its associated services before experiencing technical issues of its own due to increased traffic.

As of the time of reporting, Meta had not issued an official statement explaining the cause of the disruption. The company also had not updated its business service status channels to reflect the outage affecting its consumer-facing platforms.

Users are expected to regain access once Meta completes efforts to restore normal operations across its services.