New Delhi: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger – platforms managed by Meta – were down for over an hour on Tuesday evening for thousands of users in India and several other countries.
Users were unable to load apps, deliver messages and refresh their search feeds on Facebook and Instagram. There were more than 300,000 reports of outages on Facebook, while there were more than 20,000 reports on Instagram, according to the website. Several users were logged out of their Facebook accounts and because of the outage, they are not able to log back in.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed the outages were experienced not just in India, but in several other countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, has not reported any outages yet. Newly launched X rival Threads is down too. Within minutes of the outage, people moved to Elon Musk-owned X and #Instagramdown, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are trending on the social media platform, with users sharing memes over the global server issue. As users jumped to X to find out more about the outage, the social media giant made a cheeky comment, saying “We know why you all are here right now.” Elon Musk, the owner of X, wasn’t far behind, he took a jibe at Meta and said, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Last year, a major outage was reported in July across Meta platforms including WhatsApp. The services were restored later in the day. The outage in July came weeks after a similar issue was reported in June.
