Facebook users reported problems accessing the social media network early Sunday morning, with the website displaying a message that accounts were “temporarily unavailable.”
According to live outage tracker Downdetector, problems first began around 3:25 a.m. ET, with thousands of users reporting problems in the United States. Some users also reported issues accessing Instagram at around the same time. Both social media networks are owned by Meta.
A message on Facebook read: “Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.”
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Problems were also reported in Canada, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe.
There appeared to be a pattern emerging, with some users reporting that Facebook is working on mobile devices but not on desktop browsers. According to Downdetector, 63 percent of reported issues were related to the website, while 20 percent involved mobile devices and 10 percent involved the app.
One Reddit user reported that they initially saw an error message that said “You’ve been temporarily banned” before they were then “redirected to a generic error page.”
Another user reported that the error message they were seeing had now changed to temporarily blocked for “going too fast and overusing.” They said all they were doing was refreshing the page to see if the platform was working. Others reported experiencing the same thing.
There were also growing numbers of reports of problems with Instagram according to Downdetector. The outage-tracking site shows that 44 percent of reported issues relate to the Feed or Timeline, while 40 percent involve the app and 12 percent concern posting or publishing content. Users have reported difficulties loading feeds, sending messages and viewing stories, with some encountering error messages and server connection problems.
Downdetector also showed reports of problems with WhatsApp. The outage-tracking website says 44 percent of reported issues relate to messaging, while 39 percent involve the app and 8 percent concern login problems. However, the volume of reports appears lower than those being recorded for Facebook, suggesting any disruption to WhatsApp is more limited.
Meta has experienced several high-profile service disruptions in recent years, including a nearly six-hour global outage in October 2021 that affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. At the time, the company said the incident was caused by a faulty configuration change to its network infrastructure.
At the time, the company said the incident was caused by engineers who made a change to the company’s network systems that unintentionally cut off communication between its data centers.
More recently, in March 2024, Facebook and Instagram (and Threads and WhatsApp to a lesser extent) suffered a widespread outage that left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their accounts for more than two hours. Many users were unexpectedly logged out and unable to sign back in, while Instagram feeds failed to refresh. Meta later said the disruption was the result of a technical issue but didn’t provide extensive details about the underlying cause.
Currently, the issues seem to focus on Facebook (including Messenger), Instagram, and WhatsApp. There are no reported issues of a similar scale with Threads or the company’s other platforms, such as Meta Quest.
Christine Harrison, a professional digital designer, said analysts believe the outage may be linked to a problem that occurred during a major update to Facebook’s underlying systems. She said an analyst confirmed that the company had ”notified some regions about a planned update earlier this morning, making a glitch during that update the most likely culprit.” If a software bug or configuration error occurred during that process, it could explain why users are experiencing access problems across the platform. However, Meta has not confirmed the cause of the issues.
Newsweek has contacted Meta by email to ask if it’s aware of the reported issues across Facebook and Instagram, if the cause has been identified, and if there’s an estimated time frame for resolution.
While some users continue to report issues, the outage appears to have been largely resolved, with reports beginning to decline about one to two hours after the disruption was first detected and many users reporting that their Facebook and Instagram access had been restored. Any issues with WhatsApp appear to have been completely fixed.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Tony Phillips
This is a breaking story and will be updated.