On March 5, 2024, both Facebook and Instagram experienced significant outages, facebook and instagram downtime leaving users unexpectedly signed out and unable to access their accounts. Here are some details about the downtime:
Users experienced: Facebook Session Expired errors while trying to login to their Facebook account which was actually logged out.
- Facebook and Instagram were hit by widespread outages, with services refusing login attempts and feeds stalling. These issues were first reported around 3:30 PM GMT12.
- Interestingly, Google’s platform also experienced login problems around the same time, suggesting a common cause between the outages at these two tech conglomerates.
- Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reported disruptions to its admin center and Facebook login services. This, in turn, affected third-party services that rely on Facebook login.
- WhatsApp and the Facebook Ads Transparency page were apparently still working during the outage.
- Google’s Ad Manager also faced disruptions, but most of its consumer-facing services, including Search and YouTube, remained functional.
- While the outages were significant, they were unlikely to be as severe as Facebook’s 2021 outage, which occurred due to a configuration error in a protocol called BGP. That incident led to Facebook accidentally deleting its own address from the systems that allow servers to communicate on the internet1.
