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Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, confirmed the outage on X and said the company is working to fix the issue.
Meta is in crisis mode as many in its family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram, are currently down due to what appears to be an outage.
Many users of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and even Threads – the latest social media app launched by Meta to take on X (formerly Twitter) – have complained that the apps aren’t working. As of when this article was being written, Instagram and Facebook weren’t working on my phone either.
Downdetector, a website that records how many people cannot access a particular app or service at any given time, has shown a huge spike in the number of users complaining about the Meta family of apps experiencing an outage in Ireland.
Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, confirmed the outage on X this afternoon (5 March). “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” he wrote.
This is not the first time Meta has suffered a large-scale outage.
In March 2022, Meta said that a “technical issue” caused some people to have trouble in accessing its apps and services briefly, including Facebook and Instagram – less than a year after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were all down for several hours after a “cascading” network issue took out all the company’s services for billions of people across the world.
Of course, Meta is not alone in suffering outages. Apple fixed multiple outages in the same week as Meta in 2022, while Elon Musk’s X suffered a global outage in December last year during which users were unable to view posts.
X previously suffered two global outages within a week in March last year. At the time, the site’s support account posted that some parts of the platform were “not working as expected” due to an internal change that had “some unintended consequences”.
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