Update: It’s back! Meta quickly fixed whatever issue was taking down their platforms. You should be able to use Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as you normally would. You can find the original article below:
It’s not just you: No one can get their Meta accounts working this morning. Instagram says it can’t refresh your feed, Facebook logged you out, and Threads will load endlessly. What are we supposed to do this cold Tuesday morning, Meta? Our jobs?
I first noticed the problem with Facebook: When I went to facebook.com, the initial log in page greeted me, which was odd, since I didn’t actually log out. But, whatever: I thought I’d just log back in. But when I tried, Facebook claimed my password was wrong. Uh oh.
My first thought, of course, was that I was hacked. Panic. What else could it be? The only thing was, I never received an email saying someone changed my Facebook password, which shouldn’t have been possible in the first place since I have 2FA enabled. Logic finally won over nerves, and I imagined that maybe this wasn’t just affecting me. In these trying times, you turn to Twitter—er, X—to see if other people are experiencing the same issue. Sure enough, we’re all in the same boat.
The good news, if history is any indicator, is that this outage won’t last too long—although you may be without your Meta products for some time today. Back in 2021, Meta suffered a similar outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. That downtime lasted nearly six hours, which Meta attributed to a shut down “backbone connection” to data centers during routine maintenance. If this outage is anything like last time, Meta employees are having a rough go of it, since their internal communications were down as well. Imagine trying to put out the world’s largest digital fire without being able to properly triage the issue with your team.
For realtime overviews of what’s going on with Meta, check out Downdetector. Meanwhile, let’s just hope this isn’t like 2019, when Facebook went down for over 24 hours. Godspeed.
