A technical issue caused widespread login issues for a few hours across Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms early on Wednesday.
The disruptions started around 2am AEDT, with many users saying on rival social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
Users of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms experienced login issues early on Wednesday.Credit: Bloomberg
Andy Stone, Meta’s head communications, acknowledged the issues on X, saying the company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.
A senior official with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage.”
The outage comes just ahead of a deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for six hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.
The social media giant has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.