Facebook has been experiencing a service outage since Friday morning according to Meta, where more than 62,000 complaints were made regarding Facebook while more than 8,000 complaints were made about Instagram on Downdetector at 10:11 AM ET.
The two largest social networking websites by Meta experienced an outage Friday morning for thousands of people. An outage of both Facebook and Instagram was confirmed by Meta after numerous reports of users being unable to access either platform, as noted by Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, who made mention of the same on X.
Meta’s statement and omission
Meta responded to the Instagram outages via its spokesman Andy Stone, who made a short statement on the social network X, where he confirmed that some of the users faced problems logging into the company’s applications and said that the company was doing its best to fix the issue. No information about the timeframe of recovery, details concerning the problem itself, or particular regions or communities that were most affected by the outages was provided by Meta, as the company didn’t comment on the cause
Facebook Instagram outage The scale of the event
According to Downdetector, an online platform that gathers reports of disruption from several sources, the Facebook Instagram outage resulted in 62,000+ problems for Facebook, as well as another 8,000+ reports for Instagram, up until 10:11 AM EDT Friday. Since Downdetector collects these reports from voluntarily submitted user status updates, and not the data itself, it can be safely assumed that the number of affected people is much higher than the one mentioned above.
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Trigger still unknown; investigation in progress
Until the writing of this article, Meta had yet to clarify what caused the Facebook outage. Meta’s public statement on this matter has been restricted to Stone’s lone X message announcing that there was indeed an outage. In previous instances where large Meta outages occurred, various triggers such as DNS issues, BGP misconfigurations, and even internal misconfigurations were common culprits, although all of these possibilities have yet to be verified in the current situation.
Background Meta’s outages in the past
The Facebook Instagram outage of 2026 is just another example of how Meta has experienced regular large outages. In October 2021, there was an important one which made Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp unusable due to BGP routing error. The outage lasted around six hours and affected billions of users, creating huge reputation damage and financial loss. While this week’s outage seems less severe according to available Downdetector reports, it is hard to evaluate its extent fully because Meta did not issue a statement regarding the reasons behind this problem.
