I Was Logged Out- Facebook, Instagram Users Hit By Global Outage

UPDATE: Meta has acknowledged that its users had trouble accessing its apps including Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger following an almost two-hour outage.

"We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!" the company stated through its newsroom page.

Meta’s communication officer Andy Stone stated that there was a technical issue, causing users not to access the social media platforms.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Popular Meta-owned apps Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads have reportedly gone down across the world.

Viral Tea's editor-in-chief, Marvin Chege had raised an alarm on Tuesday, March 5 after unusual activity on Facebook saw him logged out of his own account and being unable to log back in, even with the right credentials.

Many users corroborated his sentiments as hundreds of them reported being unable to access the four apps.

On Instagram, attempts to access the news feed were met with "Something went wrong. There's an issue and the page could not be loaded."

Screengrab of a message showing an outage on Instagram. /INSTAGRAM

It is almost the same case with Threads, with the message reading "Something went wrong, please try again later."

According to Downdetector.com which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, more than 350,000 users reported downtimes on Facebook at 6.32 pm local time.

More than 54,900 users reported downtimes on Instagram, but only 640 reports were recorded from Threads and more than 8,800 reports were recorded from Facebook Messenger.

On Facebook, many users also reported experiencing problems resetting their passwords and using the two-factor authentication model to log in.

The outage has caused concern among businesses relying on both Instagram and Facebook for marketing, highlighting the significant role the platforms play in global communication.

Users have migrated to other social networks such as X (formerly Twitter) to voice frustrations and seek updates, with Facebook and Instagram trending at the very top on the rival platform.

The trending topic on X was full of complaints from thousands of users with a majority posting their frustrations while others asked what had happened.

X on its part seized the opportunity to throw jabs at the Meta platforms, posting "We know why you’re all here rn (right now)"

Meta by the time of publishing this article was yet to issue a statement on the outage of the four social media platforms.

Whereas this is not the first time either or most of the Meta apps have gone down, this is the first time that users were logged out of their Facebook accounts at random and prevented from logging back in.