Facebook and its family of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp experienced a lengthy global outage yesterday, leaving billions of users unable to access the world’s largest social media platform for much of the day.
The disruption began around 11:30 AM ET on Tuesday and stretched for over six hours before some services were partially restored in the evening. At the peak, an estimated 3.5 billion people who use Facebook’s products each month found themselves disconnected as error pages and app refusals took over their screens.
For the billions of consumers and businesses reliant on Facebook’s various apps and services for communication, commerce, and community, the outage caused widespread disruption and frustration. Small businesses that depend on Facebook and Instagram for marketing, sales and customer engagement reported financial repercussions during the blackout period.
Users attempting to access Facebook.com were met with a terse error page stating “This site can’t be reached.” Those trying to open the Facebook app on their mobile devices saw only a blank screen as the service failed to load. Facebook’s internal tools and communications platforms used by employees were also affected, compounding the company’s response efforts.
Facebook did not provide details on the root cause of the global outage as of Wednesday morning. However, the company’s communications team took to Twitter throughout the incident to acknowledge the disruptions and assure users that teams were working to restore the services.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said in a Tweet around 12:30 PM ET as the incident raged on. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
With no official channel to provide updates, anxious users flocked to Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat and other social platforms that appeared to be functioning normally. Facebook’s vast social network was suddenly forced into isolation from the internet.
Outage tracking websites like DownDetector showed a massive spike in reported problems across thousands of websites and online services roughly coinciding with the start of the Facebook disruptions, suggesting a broader network or cloud infrastructure issue may have been to blame.
The incident was among the most severe outages for Facebook’s internet empire, exceeding even the October 2021 disruption caused by an internal routing problem that took its services offline for over six hours.
As Facebook services flickered back to life by early evening in North America, details on the outage’s origins remained scarce. Experts anticipate Facebook’s teams will scrutinize the incident, with regulators also poised to examine yet another failure by one of the world’s most critical platforms.
No matter the ultimate cause, the outage will likely amplify the debate around the need for more competition and alternatives to the handful of digital utilities that billions of people have come to depend upon for online communication and commerce.
