Facebook, Instagram, Messenger down: Meta platforms suddenly stop working in huge outage

Facebook, Instagram and Messenger have gone down in what appears to be a huge outage at parent company Meta.

Users found themselves unable to load the apps or websites as normal. On Facebook, affected users found they had been logged out and were unable to get on, while Instagram refused to work at all.

:: Follow our live coverage of the outage here.

The warnings about being logged out led to widespread concern among users that their accounts had been hacked, and a variety of concerned phrases trended on Twitter/X. But the error messages appear to be the result of problems with Facebook’s login system, not a hack or cyber attack.

Meta does not run official status pages for its consumer products. But spokesperson Andy Stone posted on Twitter/X to make clear that Meta was aware of the problems.

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

Later, Mr Stone posted that the issue had been “resolved”. He attributed the problem to a “technical issue”, in keeping with the company’s longstanding practice of being vague about the cause of most of its outages.

Tracking website Down Detector showed vast outages at Instagram, Facebook and Messenger on Thursday, however. The problems were spotted right across the world, suggesting that the outage could be global.

Meta does operate a status page for its business products, including advertising on Facebook and Instagram. That page indicated that all of its products were working as expected.

WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared to be working as normal.