Facebook and Instagram services were restored after an outage was reported in India and many other parts of the world Tuesday evening. Users complained about log in issues on both these social media platforms. They were logged out of both Facebook and Instagram. Some were unable to refresh Instagram pages. Many users were also asked to change their passwords. A similar issue was faced by YouTube users shortly afterwards.
“Log in again; session expired; couldn’t refresh feed,” were some of the messages that popped up while using the Facebook and Instagram apps. The disruptions started around 8:30 pm on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Downdetector.com, an outage tracking website, reported that Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram were unavailable to tens of thousands of users. There were more than 3,00,000 reports of outages for Facebook, while there were more than 20,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.
According to Reuters, Meta’s status dashboard showed that the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business is also facing issues. WhatsApp received around 200 reports of outages on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collecting status reports from multiple sources, including users.
However, services were restored around 10 pm on Tuesday.
Meta reacts
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X social media.
X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk was quick to take potshots at Meta, saying, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
Netizens fear hacking, cyber attack
Hundreds of people took to microblogging site X reporting about Facebook and Instagram outage. One user wrote, “Is meta down or am I being hacked? 😂 my instagram isn’t loading and my facebook is also “session logged out”. Another said, “I thought my Facebook and Instagram got hacked for a second.”
“Me coming to twitter to see if #INSTAGRAM is down once again,” another user tweeted. An X user ‘Fram Freeman’ claimed, “I’ve been scrambling changing passwords 3 times thinking I’m racing the hackers like in a movie lol.”
Meanwhile, a user names Fawad Rehman posted, “Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp are down. #CyberAttack”.
