UPDATE: Facebook, Instagram back to normal; Meta apologizes for outage

Social media giants Facebook and Instagram are back up and running following an outage that lasted about two hours. The platforms’ parent company, Meta, apologized to users via X, formerly Twitter, saying it was caused by a “technical issue.”

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” spokesperson Andy Stone said. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Around mid-morning on Tuesday, outage tracker downdetector.com began reporting outages in parts of the United States and the Caribbean, including Dominica. Soon after that reports of outages began coming in from around the world.

Many Facebook users began taking to X and WhatsApp to report that they had been logged out without the option to log back in. The login issues apply to both the app and the website. Meta’s status on Threads, another social media platform it owns, showed there were “major disruptions” impacting Facebook login, as well as some other areas of the platform.

Close to two hours later, downdetector.com began reporting fewer outages but at its peak, the tracker received some 500,000 complaints from Facebook users. It is unknown how many users in total were affected since downdetector.com only measures users who report issues.

Social media outages, although not new, don’t happen often. The biggest outage Meta experienced was in 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for nearly six hours. Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption caused saying it was not due to malicious activity.