Facebook, Instagram, Messenger users report outage

Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger appeared to be experiencing technical problems Tuesday night, with users all around the world reporting that they have been logged out of their accounts.

Downdetector.com, a site that provides information about the online status of websites and social media platforms, shows the sites in red, with a massive spike in outages reported starting at around 11 p.m. Philippines time. All three social networking services are owned and developed by Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook Inc.

Users of Threads, the social network launched by Meta last year, have also reported outages.

According to a report by US technology website The Verge, cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks “noted the issue is affecting multiple countries at once.”

The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5% in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.

Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

Several hashtags pertaining to the issue—including “hacked,” “Mark Zuckerberg,” “what is happening,” “Meta” and “FB and IG”—have started trending on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44-billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France.

In his own post on X, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone said the company is aware of the problem. 

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” he said. 

On Meta’s status page, it also reported “major disruptions” affecting several of its business tools, including Ads Manager, Facebook and Instagram Shops, the Meta Business Suite, and the Meta Admin Center.

According to Super Radyo dzBB, some users have reported being able to log back in to Facebook past midnight Wednesday.

Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters. — with a report by Reuters/BM, GMA Integrated News