Social Network

Facebook and Instagram down, problems (now solved) for millions of users

On Tuesday, 5 March, a global outage affected the social networks Facebook and Instagram, preventing many users from accessing their accounts. "We are aware of the problems accessing our services. We are working on it," Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on the social media X

by B.Sim.

5 March 2024

2' min read

2' min read

Today, Tuesday 5 March, there was an interruption - lasting about an hour - of the services of Facebook and Instagram. Numerous users all over the world reported difficulties in accessing the social networks. Attempting to log in via the browser or app resulted in a loading problem, with the appearance of a blank page with no error messages or other content. Or reports of incorrect passwords.

Facebook and Instagram down

The holding company of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, the owner responsible for running Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, has not issued any official communication regarding the disruption. "We are aware of the problems with access to our services. We are working on it," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on social media X.

The cause of the outage, which lasted about an hour, is still unclear. Users, as usual, shared their experiences about the Facebook and Instagram downtime, especially on other platforms such as Twitter. Some comments related to the difficulty of logging in, with messages such as 'I can't log in, I've been banned'. Other users report the message 'Session expired' on the home page and problems with blocking when trying to log in.

Reports of issues for Messenger as well, with some reporting errors such as 'An error occurred and the page could not load' on Instagram. Even after trying to reload the page, the situation persists, preventing the viewing of posts, Reels and Stories.

Problems also on WhatsApp

Meta's status dashboard also showed problems on WhatsApp Business had issues. On Downdetector, which tracks service outages by collecting status reports from various sources, including users, about 200 reports of WhatsApp outages were recorded.

It is frankly difficult to speculate on problems related to what is happening in the Red Sea, where for several days there have been problems with some submarine cables carrying data. An incident, that is allegedly causing connection problems especially for some African states. For the time being, therefore, the problems remain with Facebook and Instagram. While waiting for Meta to clarify what happened, it is difficult to make any assumptions. It should also be pointed out that the problem appeared on a very important day for the United States of America: Super Tuesday, the day on which voting for primaries takes place in 15 states and one territory (Samoa).

In all this, Meta's stock, which was sailing in positive territory at the opening of trading, slipped into the red when the problem, which - let us remember - is global in nature, became apparent. Meta is currently losing more than 8 per cent on Wall Street.

Problem solved

Update 18:05.

Since a few minutes, the situation on the two social networks seems to be back to normal. First Facebook, and shortly afterwards Instagram, seem to be back online. Many users were forced to log in again, with the worry that their profile had been stolen. Concern averted, because the problem affected Meta's global servers. The cause of the disruption is still unknown.