Thousands of users across the world were unable to access Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday evening, as the social media platforms experienced a global outage. Users reported log in issues, being logged out, and pages not loading on both Facebook and Instagram.
According to Downdetector.com, a website that monitors outages, Facebook and Instagram were down for more than an hour, starting from around 5:15 p.m. ET. The website recorded more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook, and more than 20,000 reports for Instagram. The outage affected users in India, the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and other regions.
Users vented their frustration and shared memes on Twitter, using the hashtags #facebookdown and #instagramdown. Some users also joked about switching to other platforms, such as Snapchat, TikTok, or Telegram.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, said that the outage was caused by a configuration change that impacted users globally. The company apologized for the inconvenience and said that it quickly investigated and resolved the issue.
Facebook and Instagram are among the most popular and widely used social media platforms in the world, with billions of users. The platforms have faced several outages in the past, such as in October 2021, when a faulty configuration change disrupted the communication between Facebook’s data centers, resulting in a six-hour outage that affected millions of users worldwide. The outage also sparked a congressional inquiry and a whistleblower complaint, as well as criticism from users, regulators, and competitors.