Were you logged out of your Facebook, Messenger, Threads, or Instagram account Tuesday morning? You’re not alone.
Around 10 a.m. reports began surfacing of users being completely logged out of all Meta accounts. It quickly became apparent this was a widespread issue, with seemingly nobody able to successfully use their Meta accounts.
The real-time problem and outage monitoring website DownDetector showed nearly 400,000 people reporting Facebook issues by 10:45 a.m. By noon, all three services had returned.
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During the outage, attempting to log in led to an error that stated “An Unknown Error Has Occurred,” as did trying to reset your password. Even two-factor authentication was broken, with the code being sent, but a prompt to enter it never appearing.
A post from Meta communications spokesperson Andy Stone simply blamed “a technical issue” and added that the problem “caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.” “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted,” he said, “and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The site www.metastatus.com, which tracks the condition of services across Meta’s platform, showed “major disruptions” to tools like Ads Manager, Facebook & Instagram Shops, and Meta Business Suite, WhatsApp Business API and Messenger API, but surprisingly indicated “no known issues” for Messenger, despite massive reports to the contrary. By noon, all services showed “recovering from an outage.”
Since all down platforms use Meta to log in, early speculation is that the cause could be tied to Meta identity and access management. No actual network failures or massive DDoS attacks have been reported (yet). A similar situation happened in 2021, caused by a faulty configuration change.
We’ll update with more information as it becomes available.
