On March 5, a technical failure resulted in widespread login issues across Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger platforms.
Meta's head of communications, Andy Stone, confirmed the issues on X, formerly known as Twitter, and stated that the company "resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience."
Users reported getting locked out of their Facebook accounts, and the platform's feeds, as well as Threads and Instagram, did not refresh. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, seems unaffected.
A senior official from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was "not cognizant of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage.”
The outage occurs just ahead of the March 7th deadline for Big Tech firms to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making modifications, including allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts, and preventing personal information from being pooled to target them with online adverts. It is unclear whether the downtime is related to Meta's preparations for the DMA.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for hours in 2021, which the firm blamed on inaccurate changes to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres. The following year, WhatsApp experienced another brief outage.
Facebook engineers were dispatched to one of its key US data centres in California to restore service, indicating that the fix had to be done remotely. Further complicating matters, the outage briefly prevented some employees from using their badges to access workplaces and conference rooms, according to The New York Times, which initially reported that engineers had been called to the data centre.