How long it took Meta to fix Facebook during every major outage
Facebook is down for most users globally this afternoon - the last major outage caused chaos worldwide and forced Mark Zuckerberg to issue an apology for nearly six hours of downtime.
Its social media platforms were unable to be accessed, which affected over 3.5 billion users globally. This apology came in response to an internal technical glitch that led to the outage of Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram, back in October 2021. During the outage, potentially billions of individuals were left without access to the social media tools they heavily relied upon for communication with friends and family. Some users reported difficulties accessing services requiring a Facebook login. Additionally, businesses worldwide, dependent on social media for customer engagement, faced an unforeseen financial impact.
The repercussions extended to Mark Zuckerberg at the time, with an estimated $6 billion (£4.4 billion) loss in his personal fortune as Facebook shares experienced a sharp decline, as reported by Fortune's tracking software. Downdetector, a platform that monitors service outages, recorded an unprecedented 10.6 million problem reports globally during this outage, marking it as the largest number ever documented by the service.
Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post: "Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."
On Tuesday, March 5, at around 3.20pm, users were greeted with a "session expired" or "unexpected error" message. Downdetector, which monitors outages across the globe, is showing over 160,000 reports of Facebook being down in the UK. Instagram stands at over 40,000 reports making this one of the biggest issues for Meta in years.
At 3:52PM today (March 5), Meta's Communications Director Andy Stone shared on X (formerly Twitter): "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now."
Why Facebook went down and how it was fixed
- October 4 2021
Facebook's share price plummeted 4.9% amid the outage, with estimates that owner Mark Zuckerburg has lost $7 billion since the problems began.
The outage started at approximately 16:00 GMT on Monday. The services were successfully restored that night by around 22:00 GMT,
Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post: "Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."
- July 22 2021
A number of websites including HSBC, ITV and Waitrose were affected by a brief outage.
Barclays, TSB, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury's Bank were either entirely or partially inaccessible for a short period.
Airbnb, the PlayStation Network and Steam also experienced the temporary glitch, with some showing users a DNS error.
Reports at the time suggested the problem was linked to a performance product offered by Akamai, an American firm which began investigating the issue.
- June 8 2021
The Government's website was among a range of websites affected by a major outage.
The impact was also felt by notable media outlets including The Guardian and Independent, as well as the likes of Reddit, Amazon and Spotify.
It was linked to US firm Fastly, which helps speed up loading times by storing versions of a company's website in local servers, meaning less data has to be transferred from long distances.
While some websites were knocked completely offline, others suffered image loading problems - including Twitter's emojis - and news publishers were forced to use other platforms to report on the situation.
Fastly said the issues experienced were down to an "undiscovered software bug" in its system which was triggered by a single unnamed customer who updated their settings.
The firm said it managed to get 95% of the network operating back to normal within 49 minutes.
- December 14 2020
Google saw all its major apps, including YouTube and Gmail, go offline, leaving millions unable to access key services.
The company said the outage had occurred within its authentication system, which is used to log people into their accounts, due to an "internal storage quota issue".
In an apology to its users, Google said the issue was resolved in under an hour.
- April 14 2019
It is not the first time Facebook-owned platforms have been affected by an outage, as a similar incident.
The hashtags FacebookDown, instagramdown and whatsappdown were all trending worldwide on Twitter.
Many people ended up joking that they were relieved at least one popular social media platform was still working - in a similar way to what occurred on Monday evening.
A spokesman for Facebook at the time said: "Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps.
"The issue has since been resolved; we're sorry for any inconvenience."
- November 20 2018
Facebook and Instagram were also affected a few months prior, when users of both platforms reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.
Both acknowledged the matter but neither commented on the cause of the issue.
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