Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger have all been hit by a major outage, but they are back up and running

Well, until we hear from Meta, I think it’s time to shut down this live blog. It seems like everything is basically up and running again, and Facebook is once again a place where you can see questionable information, opinions and photos of people enjoying their little lives.

I have been your host, Roland Moore-Colyer. And until the next outage, I bid you farewell.

Meta did not explain why Facebook went bankrupt, but communications boss Any Stone cited a “technical issue” and apologized for any inconvenience caused.

So yes, you can use Facebook again as a way to check if the person you’re going on a date with is actually who they say they are. Or to make sure you do better than that person who made your life at school a living hell.

And it’s official: Meta’s Facebook login page has updated its status to in a relationship to “Recovering from disruptions”. This means that you should (soon) be able to log in to Facebook and the associated services.

My colleagues report that they can now log in to Facebook and… Down detector has seen a large drop in the number of outage reports. Looks like the drama of the day may be over, folks.

Oh oh oh! It looks like I can now log into Facebook again. That would indicate that this error has been resolved.

While there haven’t been many reports, there was a spike in AWS outages around the same time Facebook was offline. That could be an indication that the Facebook outage could be related to an issue with AWS, for example that some of the servers reserved for Meta were down.

Again, my speculation here is based on years of coverage of outages, cloud, and IT before moving into consumer tech.

When Facebook’s login issues are resolved, I really hope Mark Zuckerberg responds with something like, “Meta never lets go.”

Yeah, okay, that’s not great, but I didn’t have enough coffee today.

Another problem with Facebook being offline is: where does your uncle post or respond with the questionable opinions to equally questionable content?

Makes you think…

Remember that bit on The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg (played by Michael Cera) said, “We never crash”? Yeah, that hasn’t aged well.

FYI, if you haven’t watched The Social Network yet, fix that right away because it’s excellent.

The entire outage came a day after Instagram made some notable changes to the process of direct messaging between users. So a code gremlin or misconfigured cloud server may have had a cascading effect after the change was implemented.

Of course, this is just speculation on my part.

If you want some social media goodness to keep you entertained while Facebook is down, check out the Ny Breaking TikTok account. There we have a lot of cool videos of the latest and most interesting consumer technology.

And here’s a video of me making fun of myself…

@techradar
♬ James Bond Theme – Monty Norman

Despite the outages, Instagram is still active for me. That means I can continue to feel inadequate towards fitness influencers and people who can cook really tasty meals or have huge Lego collections.

Oh, if you’re just coming to this live blog, don’t worry you haven’t been hacked. Facebook is simply offline.

For more hacking information, check out Ny Breaking’s article on Social Media Hacking: How to Protect Your Account from Intruders.

So Meta’s Facebook login page says “Major Disruptions”. The phrase that comes to mind rhymes with ‘go hit’.

Or you can just be a little proud of X, just like Elon Musk’s tweet below.

So what do you do now that Facebook is offline? Well, I guess you’ll have to find old school friends and crushes on X or on old photos, instead of lurking on the social network.

Or you can just go outside…

So what could have caused this glitch? Well, there are numerous regions. It could be a problem with some servers or a Facebook data center could go down.

There could also be a misconfigured cloud instance, as Facebook uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its global operations. So something on that side could be the culprit.

One of the great things about such glitches is that they spawn a ton of quick and dirty memes. See below!

Also for our American readers: don’t attribute this to Super Tuesday conspiracy theories. I know it’s tempting, but no, just no.

Anyway, here’s the Down detector image for Instagram. It seems that things are not looking rosy on the technical side of Meta.

Our own American editor-in-chief, Lance Ulanoff, ever the intrepid technology journalist, quickly asked Andy Stone what was going on.

No official Facebook statement has landed in our inboxes, but Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, tweeted (or is that X-ed) the following: “We are aware that people are having difficulty accessing our services. We working on this now.”

As you might expect, X, the social media site formerly known as Facebook, is inundated with people reporting Facebook outages.

Ah! News editor Mark Wilson has just pointed out that WhatsApp only has about 300 outage reports, while Facebook’s outage reports are at 250,000.

So it appears that Meta’s main social network is bearing the brunt of the outage.

it’s hard to say, but it seems like these outages are partly region specific. WhatsApp and Instagram are fine for me, but Facebook won’t let me log in.

However, others say they can’t access Instagram and Downdetector flags WhatsApp outages.

Apparently WhatsApp users are also reporting outages, but my WhatsApp app works fine. This is strange.

Taking a look at Downdetector and Facebook just had a huge outage spike.

So when I try to log into Facebook or Facebook Messenger, I get a popup saying an “unexpected error has occurred” and I can’t get around it.