The disruption began at around 1 p.m. GMT, with reports pouring in from the UK, Europe and US.
LONDON: Millions of users worldwide were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday after a widespread outage disrupted Meta’s major social media platforms, with users reporting login failures, messaging issues and inaccessible accounts.
The disruption began at around 1 p.m. GMT, with reports pouring in from the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States and other regions.
Outage-tracking website Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in user complaints as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced simultaneous service interruptions.
Users reported being logged out of their accounts, receiving messages stating their accounts were “temporarily unavailable,” and being unable to refresh feeds or send messages across Meta’s platforms.
Meta had not immediately disclosed the cause of the outage. However, cybersecurity analysts said the disruption may have been triggered by a Domain Name System (DNS) failure, which can prevent users from connecting to internet services.
Other possible causes cited by experts include server configuration issues, backend infrastructure failures, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing errors or a cyberattack, although none had been confirmed.
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The outage drew comparisons with Meta’s October 2021 global disruption, when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were offline for nearly six hours, causing widespread service interruptions and significant financial losses for the company
