If you suddenly found yourself getting force-logged out of your Facebook accounts today, or were unable to refresh your Instagram feed, you weren’t alone.
The forced log-out and password entry failures you probably experienced (I certainly did) also probably weren’t because someone was hacking your social media accounts.
Instead, these events were (and in many places still are) part of a much larger, possibly continental or global partial Meta outage.
This cut in functionality has most notably affected Meta properties like Facebook and Instagram but also seemed to cause some havoc with other services including Google, and possibly more according to Down Detector.
Obviously, the situation is subject to updates as it progresses throughout the day.
The most widely reported problem so far with Facebook has been users getting booted out and getting incorrect password notifications when logging back in. Then upon trying to rest their passwords, none of the available options seem to work.
As for Instagram, password login seems to work fine, but feeds stopped refreshing, though message functionality is okay. Many users have reported the same for Threads, which is linked to Instagram.
While the most notorious of today’s outages seem to have hit Meta and its assets particularly hard, it’s a bit too early to assert that it’s specific to them.
We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
As Down Detector seems to be indicating, other companies have seen problems too, but this might also be because many users of these services log into them with their Facebook or IG accounts.
This, if true, could have contributed to wider login problems that cascaded out in unpredictable ways affecting some major services more than others.
The last time in which Meta faced such a major and visible outage was back in 2021. In that case, all of the company’s services stopped working for most users and stayed down for several hours.
In today’s incident, login was restored for many users in just minutes, though we’ll see if anything tumbles back down into failure mode as the day progresses.
This situation is ongoing, though a representative from Meta has posted on X (formerly Twitter) stating that the company is fixing the problems with its services.
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