Meta's facebook, Instagram suffer global outage

Meta-owned social media platforms facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users on Tuesday (March 5) in a global outage.

The disruptions started around 11.30pm with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

There were more than 300,000 reports of outages for facebook and 40,000 reports for Instagram on tracking website Downdetector.com.

"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.

The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5% 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.

Though 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, 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".

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk's US$44bil purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the United States to France. – Reuters