Facebook and Instagram have been hit by a widespread global outage, leaving millions of users unable to access key features across the social media platforms.
The disruption affected Facebook’s main website, mobile application and Messenger service, with many users reporting that they were unexpectedly logged out of their accounts and unable to sign back in.
Attempts to log in were met with error messages indicating that “an unexpected error occurred,” while the Facebook website displayed a notice stating that “something went wrong” and that the issue was being worked on.
Although WhatsApp appeared largely unaffected, some Instagram services also experienced disruptions, particularly on the web version of the platform.
The outage triggered a surge in complaints across online monitoring platforms, with users from different parts of the world reporting difficulties accessing Meta-owned services.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had not immediately issued an official statement on the cause of the disruption at the time of reporting.
The company does not maintain a public status page for its consumer-facing products, making it difficult for users to obtain real-time updates during service interruptions.
Meanwhile, outage-tracking platform Downdetector also appeared to experience technical issues around the same time, after initially recording a sharp spike in reports linked to Facebook and Instagram.
The cause of the outage remains unclear, and Meta engineers are expected to continue investigations to determine the source of the disruption and restore full service to affected users.
