Meta: 'Technical Issue Brought Our Services Down'
Meta has released a statement on the outage of its services that occurred around 11 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5, Philippine time.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted on X, “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 apologize for any inconvenience.”
Meta’s own Newsroom account on X said, “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!”
No further details were given about the cause of the outage at the time of this writing.
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A report from Reuters said that the White House National Security Council had been watching over the incident. However, no evidence of any cyber-attack or such malicious activity was found by them.
The outage affected Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram users by suddenly logging out of their accounts on Tuesday night. Attempts to log back in were denied, redirecting back to the login page. Apparently, users all over the world were affected.
Some users went on other platforms, such as X, to report the outage and voice worries that they may have been hacked. On the Philippine version of the outage tracking website Down Detector, nearly 150,000 users reported being unable to log into the site. Worldwide, at least 500,000 users reported the outage on Down Detector.
The Meta services outage lasted just around one hour, being restored by 12:30 a.m. of Wednesday, March 6, Philippine time.
The outage also came a day after Meta’s announcement that it will allow users to edit direct messages on Instagram within 15 minutes of initial posting. This feature had already been introduced to Facebook and Whatsapp earlier.
X owner Elon Musk apparently took advantage of the outage to take a potshot at Meta, saying, "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working."
X itself underwent an outage in December 2022, affecting some 77,000 across several countries. This followed Musk's acquisition of the platform in October 2022.
Musk is also known to play up his rivalry with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to the point of challenging Zuckerberg to a UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)-style cage match in early 2023. Zuckerberg initially accepted, but withdrew some time before the August 26 fight. Both business figures claimed to have training in various martial arts.
Meta users number some 3.19 billion across its range of apps, which includes Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
The last major outage that affected Facebook before this latest one was in October 2021, when a “wrong command” during routine maintenance work brought down Facebook’s global backbone. The shutdown lasted six hours.
