Meta’s Facebook, Messenger and Instagram are down worldwide, leaving hundreds of thousands of users unable to access the social media platforms.
A source inside Facebook told DailyMail.com that the company’s internal systems were also down, which may have led to Tuesday’s outage.
The issues appeared around 10:20am ET (3:20pm GMT) and are impacting all social media sites’ apps and websites.
DownDetector, which monitors online outages, shows hundreds of thousands of Americans are having problems with Facebook and tens of thousands reported the same with Instagram – Messenger has a few thousand issue reports.
Along with the US, the outage has reached the UK, parts of Europe, China, Australia and Mexico.
Facebook’s and Messenger’s glitches surfaced when users noticed they were kicked out of their accounts and unable to log back in – even with the right credentials.
While the News Feed on Instagram is showing an error message.
DownDetector’s outage map shows New York City in the red, along with Boston, Chicago and major cities in California.
The majority of issue reports cite problems with the apps – 72 percent for Facebook, 64 percent for Instagram and Messenger is at 50 percent.
Users have flocked to Elon Musk’s X to share their frustrations and inquire if anyone else in the world is experiencing the same problems.
Some people experiencing issues initially thought their accounts may have been hacked, but there are more than 80,000 posts on X about Facebook and Instagram being down.
Elon Musk has responded to Meta’s outage with a post on X: ‘If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.’
Meta’s service dashboard, which lists its services, has continued to show major disruptions for some feature – but then has switched to ‘Unknown’ for all or completely blank.
While the Facebook insider told DailyMail.com the issued stemmed from internal tools, the public has shared their speculations on X.
Some have suggested that the outage is a ‘cyberattack’ as it is happening on Super Tuesday, which is when several states are set to hold presidential primaries.
While the reason for the outage remains unclear, it comes three years after Facebook experienced a seven-hour blackout that cost the company an estimated $100million in lost revenue.
The global outage – which hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – was caused when a faulty update that disconnected its servers from the internet, meaning engineers had to travel to its Santa Clara data center to fix the glitch in-person.
But the repair was delayed, according to one insider who was posting on Reddit, because of ‘lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures’.
The glitch, which prompted calls for a break-up of big tech firms, also brought down messaging services that remote-working staff use to communicate, so those who knew how to fix the servers couldn’t get that information to the teams inside the data-center, the insider said.
Also disabled were key-fob entry systems at Facebook’s main campus in Menlo, meaning those who had been WFH but rushed back to the office could not get inside while those already inside were unable to access conference rooms and other areas that required a pass.
Source: DAILY MAIL ONLINE
