UPDATE
A technical issue caused widespread login issues for a few hours across Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms Tuesday.
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Andy Stone, Meta’s head communications, acknowledged the issues on X, formerly known as Twitter, and said the company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.
A senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.”
The outage comes just ahead of Thursday’s deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.
ORIGINAL STORY
If you’re having trouble logging into Facebook or Instagram, you’re not alone.
As of 10:29 a.m., roughly half a million Facebook users are reporting widespread outages across multiple countries, with many unable to log into their Facebook, according to Downdetector. This is in addition to approximately 92,000 users who are experiencing issues with their Instagram account as well, a popular social media site also owned by Meta.
According to Kentik and NetBlocks, both of which monitor internet traffic, several Meta companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger have experienced a significant drop in traffic.
On mobile devices, when some users try to log into their Facebook account, many are receiving an error message, reading “session expired, please log in again” or a message saying your password has expired. And for Instagram, some users are unable to refresh their pages.
This comes in the midst of Super Tuesday, one of the biggest days leading up to the Presidential General Election.
NBC News reports that when asked about the outage, a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said: ”We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity.”
At this time, it is unclear when the outages will be restored.
In a post on X, Meta communications director Andy Stone addressed the outage, saying, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
We will continue to update this article as we learn more.
Stay with 10 News as this breaking news story develops.