Facebook, Instagram suffer global outage, users logged out

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage on Friday, leaving millions of users across the world unable to access their accounts.

The disruption affected Facebook’s main website, mobile application and Messenger service, with many users reporting that they were automatically logged out of their accounts.

Attempts to log back in were met with error messages indicating that “an unexpected error occurred,” while visitors to Facebook’s website were shown a notice stating that the company was working to resolve the issue.

Reports of the outage quickly flooded social media platform X, formerly Twitter, as users turned to the site to confirm whether others were experiencing similar problems.

While Facebook and Instagram were the most affected services, WhatsApp appeared to remain largely operational despite sharing some backend infrastructure with other Meta platforms. However, some users also reported issues accessing Instagram’s website.

The outage appeared to be global, with complaints emerging from multiple countries within a short period.

Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, recorded a sharp spike in reports relating to Facebook and its products before the website itself experienced technical difficulties.

Meta had yet to issue an official statement on the cause of the outage as of the time of filing this report.

The company does not operate a public status page for its consumer-facing platforms, although it maintains one for business services, which had not been updated to reflect the disruption.