Thousands of users across the world experienced difficulties accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Sunday after the Meta-owned platforms suffered a widespread outage.
The disruption began at around 10:25 a.m., according to outage-tracking website Downdetector, with thousands of reports initially coming from users in the United States before spreading to other countries, including Kenya, Canada, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom and several parts of Europe.
Users attempting to access Facebook were met with an error message stating:
“Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.”
Downdetector data indicated that 63 percent of reported Facebook issues were related to the website, while 20 percent affected mobile devices and 10 percent involved the mobile application.
Some users reported that Facebook remained accessible through mobile devices but not on desktop browsers, suggesting the disruption affected different platforms unevenly.
Several users also reported receiving misleading messages indicating their accounts had been temporarily banned or blocked before being redirected to a generic error page.
Reports of problems with Instagram also increased during the outage. According to Downdetector, 44 percent of reported issues involved the news feed or timeline, 40 percent affected the mobile app and 12 percent were linked to posting content.
Instagram users reported difficulties loading feeds, sending direct messages and viewing stories, with some encountering server connection errors.
WhatsApp also experienced intermittent disruptions, although the number of reports was lower than those recorded for Facebook and Instagram.
Downdetector showed that 44 percent of WhatsApp complaints related to messaging, 39 percent involved the application itself and 8 percent were linked to login problems.
Meta had not issued an official statement on the cause of the outage by the time of publication.
Digital designer Christine Harrison said analysts believe the disruption may have been linked to a major system update being rolled out by Meta.
According to Harrison, some analysts suggested the company had notified certain regions about planned system updates earlier in the day, raising the possibility that a software bug or configuration error during the update triggered the outage.
However, Meta has not confirmed whether the incident was related to a system update.
The latest disruption follows several major outages experienced by Meta in recent years.
In October 2021, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were unavailable globally for nearly six hours after a faulty network configuration disrupted communication between the company’s data centres.
In March 2024, Facebook and Instagram also suffered a widespread outage that left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their accounts for more than two hours after many were unexpectedly logged out.
As of Sunday, the outage appeared to primarily affect Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, while there were no reports of major disruptions affecting Threads or other Meta services.
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