Facebook, Instagram Service Restored After Outage
Facebook and Instagram services have been restored after an outage that lasted for about an hour.
Users of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram were logged out of the mediums following an outage around 3:30 pm on Tuesday.
But services were restored after Meta, owners of the platform said it was working to make that happen.
Checks by Channels Television showed that services on the social media platforms have been restored and users can now access them.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X.
“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Earlier, Facebook users were logged out of the platform with a message that read, “The password that you’ve entered is incorrect” while on Instagram, it returned the message, “Something went wrong. There’s an issue and the page could not be loaded”.
Millions of users reported the outage on X with the hashtag #instagramdown and “Facebook and Instagram” among the top trends.
A visit to the website Downdetector showed many users reporting issues with logging into Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
However, Meta, owners of both platforms, assured that it was looking into the outages which also affected Threads.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Andy wrote in a post on X.
Threads, the rival to Twitter that was launched in 2023, also suffered reports of outages, though WhatsApp, Meta’s messaging service, seemed spared.
Facebook suffered a similar outage in October 2021 which was attributed to technical issues, not a security hack as originally feared.
At the height of the incident on Tuesday, Facebook’s status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering “major disruptions” and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.
On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.
Reports said that Meta’s virtual reality headsets were also suffering problems, with the device’s Horizon World platform not allowing users to sign in.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with three billion active monthly users.
Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.
X, formerly Twitter, saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.
“Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here,” wrote X CEO Linda Yaccarino, taking a dig at its rival.
