Facebook and Instagram were down big time this morning

Meta experienced issues with some of its most important services this morning. People across the globe reported that they couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Some people were also not able to access Google services for a time, though that situation seems to have resolved itself much faster.

The problems on Meta services started showing up at around 10:00 am ET and seem to have started coming back online at roughly 12:00 pm ET. Meta Communications Manager Andy Stone confirmed that there were problems in a post on X (formerly Twitter), stating that the company was working on it (via The Verge). On Downdetector.com, a website that collects user reports on service outages, one can see that many services have stopped spiking.

From our own testing, we could confirm the issues across different regions. For some of our US team members, Google services were briefly unavailable, while many of our European staff could still access them. Meta seems to have suffered from a more widespread problem, as we had team members on both sides of the pond unable to access services like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

During the outage, Facebook and Instagram started trending on X in different places around the world, with people discussing the fact that they can’t access these other social networks.

Right now, the cause for the outage is entirely unclear. In the past, content delivery network services could cause issues for multiple websites, like in October 2023 with Cloudflare. There were recently also issues with undersea cables, with a few cables in the Red Sea currently damaged and some internet traffic between Europe and Asia diverted, which may have come into play here.

Thanks: Kieron, Moshe

Update Mar 5, 2024, 11:50 ET: Article updated to note that Facebook is becoming accessible for more people again.