Social media giant Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, experienced widespread service outages on Tuesday, affecting users globally.
The problems started around 3:30 PM GMT, with users reporting difficulties logging in and accessing their feeds on both platforms. These issues continued for approximately two hours before gradually resolving around 5 PM GMT.
Unusually, Google also reported login problems on its platforms coinciding with the Meta outages, suggesting a potential common underlying cause. While the full extent of the issue remains unclear, experts suggest a systemic internet problem might be to blame.
Meta’s official business status page reported “major disruptions” impacting its admin center and Facebook Login, a service allowing users to log in to other platforms using their Facebook credentials. This further amplified the issue, causing login disruptions across various other websites that rely on Facebook Login for authentication.
At the peak of the outage, Meta’s status page itself became unavailable, adding further confusion for users. However, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone took to X, a rival platform, to assure users that they were aware of the problem and actively working on a resolution.
While the extent of these outages appears less severe compared to the company’s 2021 incident, it still caused significant disruption for users worldwide. In 2021, a configuration error led to Facebook accidentally deleting its own internet address, causing a global outage that lasted for several hours.
Google, on the other hand, experienced more contained issues, primarily affecting its Ad Manager platform and some business customers facing login problems. Most consumer-facing services like search and YouTube remained functional during the event.
Sporadic issues were also reported by users of other platforms like X and Microsoft Teams, further pointing towards a potential systemic internet problem as the root cause. The full details and exact cause of these outages are still under investigation by the respective companies, with official statements expected to provide further clarity.
