Facebook and Instagram users across the world experienced difficulties accessing the social media platforms on Friday, with thousands reporting login failures, loading issues and service disruptions in what appeared to be a widespread outage affecting Meta-owned services.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, user reports surged across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger as the disruption spread through multiple countries.
Downdetector displayed alerts stating: “User reports show possible problems with Facebook” and “User reports show possible problems with Instagram,” indicating a sharp increase in complaints from users attempting to access the platforms.
As the outage unfolded, users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts, encountering error messages and struggling to reload feeds or access core features on both platforms. Reports also extended to Facebook Messenger and some business tools operated by Meta.
Reuters reported that more than 62,000 complaints were recorded for Facebook and over 8,000 for Instagram during the peak of the disruption, although the actual number of affected users may have been significantly higher because Downdetector relies on user-submitted reports.
Meta acknowledged the issue through its communications director, Andy Stone, who wrote on X: “We’re aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services. We’re working on it.”
The outage quickly sparked reactions across rival social media platforms, where users shared screenshots of failed login attempts and error messages while seeking confirmation that the problem was not limited to their accounts.
The disruption is the latest in a series of outages to affect Meta’s family of applications in recent years. However, as of the time of filing this report, the company had not disclosed the cause of Friday’s incident. The situation remained under monitoring as engineers worked to restore full service across Facebook, Instagram and other affected Meta platforms.
