Facebook and Instagram: Meta services hit by widespread outages

Facebook and Instagram faced significant problems globally on Tuesday, with the platforms denying access to users trying to log in and causing interruptions in the news feed.

These disruptions were first noticed around 3:30 pm GMT and started to resolve by 5:00 pm.

In a rare event, these problems happened alongside login issues on Google’s services, indicating that there might have been a shared reason for the technical difficulties affecting the two major tech companies that usually operate on their independent infrastructures.

Meta’s business status page has shown several disruptions, including significant issues with its admin center and Facebook login—a service enabling login to third-party sites with Facebook credentials. As a result, several other websites have also experienced outages.

By 4pm GMT, Meta indicated an ‘unknown’ status for all services except for Instagram’s Messenger API. Services like WhatsApp and the Facebook ads transparency page seem to be functioning normally. However, at 4.15pm, the Meta status page itself ceased working.

After a week of silence, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted on X, stating, ‘We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.’

Google’s ads status page has noted a disruption to Ad Manager around 3.30pm GMT and is looking into other potential issues. Unlike Meta’s widespread disruptions, Google’s troubles were more limited—consumer services like search and YouTube remained active. Issues with the company’s login service did affect some business clients, including the Guardian.

The underlying issue might be systemic internet problems, with sporadic disruptions also reported on X and Microsoft’s Teams.

The current outages seem less critical than Facebook’s major outage in 2021, caused by a misconfiguration in an obscure protocol known as BGP, which resulted in Facebook inadvertently removing its own servers from the internet’s address systems.