Facebook and Instagram are down for many users
Update: Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta services are back up.
The original story continues below...
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The outage began on the morning of March 5, at around 10 a.m. Eastern time.
A quick look at Downdetector, a website that shows real-time information about the status of popular websites, indicates that as of 10 a.m., over 53 thousand people are having issues with Instagram, while more than 4,800 people have reported problems with Facebook.
DailyMail says that they have learned from a source inside of Facebook that the company's internal systems were also down and this might be why Facebook and Instagram have crashed as well.
The outage is affecting not only the Facebook and Instagram apps but also their websites. Facebook Messenger and Threads have also stopped working. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, continues to work fine.
The March 5 Facebook outage has also impacted Meta business products including Meta Admin Center, Facebook login, WhatsApp Business API, and Marketing API, reports CNBC.
Meta communications director Andy Stone says on X that the company is aware of the outage and the company's team is working to bring the services back up.
The outage appears to be widespread as people the world over are reporting problems with Meta's services. The last we saw such a severe outage was in 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were inaccessible for over six hours. That outage was caused by an accidental command that disconnected all of the data centers.
The timing of the crash coincides with Super Tuesday 2024, which is when presidential primaries or caucuses will be held in many US states, and roughly with the EU's Wednesday deadline for tech behemoths to comply with the Digital Markets Act.
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