Facebook and Instagram went down on March 5, when an outage left potentially millions unable to access their accounts.
The outage was caused by an unspecified ‘technical issue,’ Meta has said.
Users found they were mysteriously logged out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts and not able to log back in, some could not open the apps at all.
Reacting to the outage, Meta responded, ‘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 social media.
Mr Stone later said the issue was resolved on Tuesday and apologized on behalf of the tech giant, which owns Facebook and Instagram, without revealing much in terms of details.
‘Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,’ Mr Stone said.
The platforms seem to have come back online after a nearly two-hour-long outage.
Users criticize lack of information about Facebook and Instagram outage
Meta doesn’t run an official status account and since it gave very little information about what was happening during the outage, users were frustrated, many of whom worried that they had been hacked because of the problems.
And that wasn’t only limited to Facebook.
Meta’s VR headset users also experienced outage
Users of the Meta Quest headset, which was also hit by an outage saw an error message that suggested there was something wrong with their kit.
Some users of Meta Quest virtual reality headsets experienced issues logging into their devices amid the global outage affecting Facebook, Instagram, and Threads yesterday, The Verge reported.
‘No issues out of ordinary,’ US cybersecurity agency says
US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it did not observe any issues ‘out of the ordinary,’ Axios first reported, as the agency took note of the global outage of Facebook and Instagram.
Tuesday was a big day foe the upcoming US Presidential race, where 15 states elected delegates to decide which candidates would run for presidency.
Several users on social media raised concerns initially that there may have been a ‘cyberattack involved.’
At a press briefing yesterday, CISA said it was ‘aware of the incident and the global scope of it,’ adding that malicious intent was unlikely.
‘We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage,’ the US agency said.
Meta’s platforms Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp experienced similar outage in 2021
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a similar outage that lasted for nearly 6 hours in 2021, which in a later blogpost, Facebook noted had happened due to a mishap during a routine maintenance job.
The company said a command issued by its engineers during maintenance unintentionally took down all the connections in its network, ‘effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally.’
At the time Facebook said it would strengthen ‘testing, drills and overall resilience’ to make sure such events happened ‘rarely as possible.’
Meta staff thought they were laid off
Several employees at Meta who were unable to login to their internal work systems during the global outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Tuesday wondered if they were laid off, Reuters reported.
At its peak, the outage led to 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to Downdetector.com.
Meta apologizes for Facebook, Insta outage and thanks users
Following the brief chaos Meta apologized to users and thanked them for their patience.
Tuesday’s outage of Facebook and Instagram came just a day after Meta announced that it will be letting people edit and undo their direct messages (DMs).