WASHINGTON: Meta suffered a highly unusual outage of all its social media platforms on Tues­day, with users of Face­book, Instagram and Threads being locked out of their accounts for several hours.

Internet monitor Net­blocks reported that Facebook, Instagram and Messenger were experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries.

Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads.

Its status dashboard earlier showed the applic­ation programming int­er­face for WhatsApp Busin­ess was also facing issues.

However, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

The disruptions started at around 8pm Pakistan time (1500 GMT) and continued for around two hours.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Insta­gram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.

At the height of the problem on Tuesday, Face­book’s status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering “major disruptions” and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password. On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.

Reports said that Meta’s virtual reality headsets were also suffering problems, with the device’s Horizon World platform not allowing users to sign in.

X, formerly Twitter, saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.

The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

“Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here,” wrote X CEO Linda Yaccarino, taking a dig at its rival.

The White House Nat­ional Security Council was also monitoring the incident and said it was not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity, a spokesperson said.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2024