Facebook and Instagram down: Social media users report issues as Meta platforms experience worldwide outage
5 March 2024, 15:39 | Updated: 5 March 2024, 16:37
Facebook and Instagram have gone down, according to thousands of the social media platforms' users across the globe.
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Users across the world reported outage issues that prevented them from getting on to the social media platforms.
Facebook and Instagram users said they were logged out of the platform and were not able to access their accounts again, in what appears to be a huge worldwide outage for parent company Meta.
As netizens tried to log in this afternoon, they were greeted with a "session expired" or "unexpected error" message.
Issues began around 3pm GMT on Tuesday afternoon and affected both the apps and the desktop platforms.
However, at around 4.30pm GMT, some Facebook users said they were able to log in again, but others were still experiencing issues on Instagram.
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Over 90,000 Facebook users and 15,000 Instagram users reported issues with the platform on DownDetector within half an hour of the platform experiencing issues earlier this afternoon.
Issues were also reported on Meta's other app Threads - which intends to rival X, formerly known as Twitter, according to DownDetector.
Meta said on its status page earlier: "We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."
WhatsApp, which is also run by the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company, appeared not to have any widespread issues today, however.
Users took to X instead to share their fury after not being able to use any of the Meta platforms.
"Has Facebook just booted you out? You're not alone," one user said on X with a screenshot of the error message.
"I’ve spent the last hour thinking my Facebook & IG were hacked," another said. "THE RELIEF knowing it’s f***ed up across the board?? Does anyone know what happened?? Cyber attack?"
A third said: "My anxiety thinking that my Facebook & Instagram got hacked but thank God it's happening the same thing with everyone."
In a jibe at Meta, X - which is run by Elon Musk who has had a long-running personal feud with Zuckerberg - posted to their platform: "we know why you’re all here rn (right now)"
