Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage on Friday, leaving millions of users worldwide unable to access their accounts.
The disruption affected Facebook’s main website, mobile app, and Messenger service, with many users reporting that they were automatically logged out.
Attempts to sign back in were met with error messages stating that “an unexpected error occurred,” while Facebook’s website displayed a notice indicating that the company was working to resolve the issue.
Reports of the outage quickly spread to X, formerly Twitter, where users turned to confirm whether others were experiencing similar problems.
While Facebook and Instagram were the most heavily affected services, WhatsApp appeared to remain largely operational, despite sharing some backend infrastructure with other Meta platforms. However, some users reported intermittent issues with Instagram’s web version.
The outage appeared to be global, with reports emerging from multiple countries within a short period.
Downdetector, which tracks online service disruptions, recorded a sharp spike in reports related to Facebook and its services before itself experiencing technical issues amid the surge in traffic.
Meta had not issued an official statement on the cause of the outage as of the time of publication.
The company does not maintain a public status page for its consumer platforms, although it does provide one for business services, which had not been updated to reflect the disruption.
