05 March 2024 , 17:31
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Meta have issued an apology after tens of thousands of users reported being unable to access Facebook and Instagram.
The two popular social media sites are owned by the same company, and the outage left hundreds of thousands of users unable to login. Attempts to login, even when using a correct password, instead resulted in a 'session expired' error.
The issues, which lasted around one-and-a-half hours, are now said by Meta to have been fixed.
In a new statement on Tuesday evening, Meta communications chief Andy Stone said: "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 apologise for any inconvenience."
Meta have issued a statement following today's Facebook and Instagram issues (Getty Images)A separate update from the tech giant read: "We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!"
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According to Down Detector, which monitors website issues around the world, the issues started at around 3pm on Tuesday. More than 30,000 reports of issues were made to the site for both Instagram and Facebook within only a few minutes, with hundreds of thousands of users eventually thought to have been hit.
Thousands of reports were recorded on DownDetectorMeta-owned social media website Threads was also impacted by the outage. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, did not appear to be experiencing problems on Tuesday.
Posting about the problems on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, one user wrote: "Has Facebook and Messenger logged you out and then rejects your password? Don't panic, you're not alone, LOADS of people seem to be experiencing this right now. I guess we just gotta wait and see what the heck this is." A Meta spokesman had earlier said: "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now."
X owner and billionaire Elon Musk meanwhile responded to Meta outage with a joke on his own social media network. He said in a tweet: "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working."
Cybersecurity expert Matthew Green said the outage appears to go beyond Meta - and may suggest an issue at a cloud services provider. He told the Associated Press: "There are a number of services having trouble with at least parts of their systems, particularly the ability to log into websites. This may indicate a common cause, like a failure at a major cloud services provider. At the moment nobody knows exactly what’s happening."
Major outages on Meta services have occurred in the past, although they tend to be rare. In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for several hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres. The following year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.