If you had difficulty using Facebook and Instagram today, we have some news: you weren’t alone. On Tuesday, March 5, both of the Meta-owned social media websites were experiencing outages, rendering them unusable for many people. This came after AT&T experienced a nationwide outage of its own last month.
When did this Facebook/Instagram outage start? Are any other websites down? Is the outage fixed? Here’s everything we know.
When did the Facebook and Instagram outage start?
Looking at Down Detector, reports of Facebook and Instagram being down first started coming in a little before 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Reports spiked around 10:24 a.m., with over 500,000 outage reports coming in at that time.
Instagram outage reports saw a similar spike, with over 77,000 outage reports coming into Down Detector around the same time.
What was wrong? Users were reporting that they had been logged out of Facebook with no ability to log back into their accounts. As for Instagram, we saw reports of people’s feeds not refreshing to show new posts.
Are Facebook and Instagram still down?
As of 12:50 p.m. ET, it looks like Facebook and Instagram are gradually coming back online. Via the Meta Status website, Meta now reports that all of the following services are “Recovering from disruptions”:
- Ads Manager
- Facebook & Instagram Shops
- Meta Business Suite
- Meta Admin Center
- Facebook Login
- Graph API
- Messenger API for Instagram
- Messenger Platform
- WhatsApp Business API
Additionally, at 12:19 p.m., Andy Stone on the Meta Communications team posted the following on X:
Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
There’s a chance Facebook and Instagram may still be acting up for you, but it looks like everything is coming back online and gradually returning to normal.
Where was the Facebook and Instagram outage happening?
The Facebook and Instagram outages appeared to be affecting people all over the U.S. Down Detector showed reports in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and throughout Florida, Michigan, New York, and elsewhere.
If you lived in the U.S., chances are you were affected.
Is there also a YouTube outage?
In addition to Facebook and Instagram, YouTube has also confirmed that it’s experiencing issues as well. At 11:28 a.m. ET, the Team YouTube account acknowledged its own issues on X:
thanks to everyone who sent notes about loading issues with YouTube: we're on it! 🔍
will follow up here once things are back to normal, you can also follow our Help Community post for details ➡️ https://t.co/4Ezmtku3Em
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) March 5, 2024
As far as YouTube’s issues are concerned, there have been reports of empty home pages, Shorts not loading, and more. It’s unclear when YouTube will be back to normal, but we suspect it’ll take some time.
Are other websites down?
In addition to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, there were other websites with increased outage reports this morning. Down Detector also showed increased outage reports for Google Play, Threads, X (formerly Twitter), and other websites.
It’s unclear if these outages were related, separate issues, or incorrect user reports. Cloudflare did identify an issue this morning, too, so it’s possible all of these outages are related to that. Cloudflare says it began implementing a fix shortly after 11 a.m. ET, and most issues appear to have slowly gotten back to normal after that.
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