Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, stopped working for several hours across the globe yesterday. While some users wondered whether the platforms were hacked when they suddenly stopped working, others said they had to check their Internet connections to be sure they still had data.
Several users, who took to X to find out what had happened, posted images of the reply they got when they were logged in.These include, “Unable to log in. An unexpected error occurred. Please, try logging in again” “Your session has expired. Please, login again.”
According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users, there were more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook, while there were more than 20,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.
After several minutes, Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone said, in a post on X, said: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
According to Reuters, the social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5 per cent in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads. Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
However, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, with under 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
