Meta services begin recovering from major disruption

Widespread outages for Facebook, Instagram and Threads were reported Tuesday morning, as parent company Meta warned that many of its core services were suffering from outages.

A status page went from listing all of Meta’s services as “unknown” to “major disruptions” for business tools like Ads Manager, Facebook and Instagram Shops, Meta Business Suite and Meta Admin Center, as well as Facebook Login, Graph API, WhatsApp Business API, and Marketing API.

All of the outages list an inability to log in to the company’s services as the core issue, but little further information is available from Meta at this point. An email inquiry for more data received no immediate reply.

Posts on other social media including X, formerly Twitter, and postings to the outages digest mailing list confirm widespread disruptions to Meta-provided services, and an influx of reports to Downdetector.com underline that a major disruption occurred sometime around 11 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday.

Downdetector also showed that problems with other major online services, including Google, YouTube, Amazon and major wireless providers were also present this morning, though reports seemed to be trailing off as of 11:45 AM Eastern. AWS’s Health Dashboard showed no problems as of noon Eastern Time. Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard did indicate service disruptions, with a status message saying that “some Gmail users are experiencing elevated error rates while performing various actions and may also see delays in email delivery.”

Measurement difficulties

One of the last major outages for Meta happened in October 2021, when most of the company’s social media channels went offline for over seven hours.

In that case, the problem was self-inflicted: during a routine maintenance operation, a command intended to measure the company’s available global backbone network capacity unintentionally shut down that network, disconnecting all its datacenters.

One study tracked a wide range of reactions to the unexpected mass outage—everything from stress and fear of missing out (FoMO) to the so-called “joy of missing out” were seen among respondents to an online survey performed by researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.

“The global outage of the leading social media platforms on October 4, 2021 had a significant impact on users’ mood and experience,” the researchers said. “The findings add to a large body of research that investigates the relationships between FoMO, social media intensity, and stress.”

This time around, the outage appeared to be shorter-lived. As of noon Eastern, several of Meta’s tools showed as “recovering from disruptions” on its status page, but little further information was provided on the reason for the disruption.