Facebook, Instagram hit by global outages, users logged out

Instagram, Facebook and Facebook Messenger are not working for many users this morning.

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads went down for users around the world this morning, with many people unable to log in to their accounts for more than an hour.

Parent company Meta says the issues with the sites - first reported about 4am - have now been resolved.

Most people were finding they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts and could not log back in, while Instagram feeds would not load.

From around 5.40am users began to report the sites were working again.

Meta communications director Andy Stone posted to X - formerly Twitter - at around 6.20am that there had been a “technical issue” and it had been resolved as quickly as possible.

“We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024

The website Down Detector received tens of thousands of reports of issues with the social media sites from around the globe.

One reader told the Herald they had tried many times to log in to Facebook, even changing their password but to no avail. The issue was “very frustrating”, they said.

Another said her whole house was affected by the outage - first thinking their accounts or the wifi router had been hacked. Her 7-year-old son, who is autistic, has been “inconsolable”, she said.

However another reader said while she could not log in via her phone, she could still access the site using her tablet.

Numerous Newstalk ZB listeners also called and texted to say they were experiencing problems early this morning.

Meta trying to fix ‘major disruption’

Parent company Meta - which owns the platforms - posted on its website at 4.17am warning of “major disruption”.

“We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

A London-based internet monitoring firm, Netblocks - which advocates for internet freedom - said there was no sign of “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”, according to AP.