Facebook, Instagram down, thousands of users affected

Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread global outage on Sunday, leaving thousands of users unable to access their accounts or use key features on the platforms.

The disruption, which began around 9:30 a.m., affected users across several countries, with Facebook displaying an error message stating that accounts were “temporarily unavailable” due to a site issue.

The message read: “Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.”

Data from outage monitoring platform DownDetector showed a sharp increase in complaints, with more than 3,000 reports from Facebook users shortly after the outage began. Many affected users turned to other social media platforms to report the disruption.

While Facebook’s desktop version was largely inaccessible, some users reported that the mobile application continued to function normally.

The outage also impacted Instagram, another platform owned by Meta, with users reporting that their feeds failed to refresh and new posts could not be loaded.

DownDetector similarly recorded a surge in complaints from Instagram users experiencing service disruptions.

Facebook and Instagram are among the world’s most widely used social media platforms, serving billions of users for communication, business promotion, digital marketing and content sharing.

Meta had not issued an official statement on the cause of the outage as of the time of filing this report.