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ISLAMABAD: Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram briefly experienced outages on Sunday, according to reports from real-time outage monitor Downdetector.
According to Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, users in Pakistan began reporting problems with Facebook at around 12:30pm.
Outage reports peaked at 196 at 1:40pm before the issue was resolved at around 2:40pm.
Instagram also recorded a sharp rise in outage reports from around 12:30pm, with reports peaking at 204 at about 1:29pm.
Users in Pakistan, US and other countries report disruptions; WhatsApp remains unaffected
In the United States, 4,808 Facebook users had reported issues by 12:45pm, while 2,829 Instagram users reported problems with the app by 1:18pm.
Checks by Reuters also found that access to Facebook and Instagram was intermittent in Singapore.
Downdetector logged thousands of reports of disruptions affecting Meta’s services, with users across the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and other regions reporting outages.
During the outage, affected Facebook users saw an error message stating that their accounts were "currently unavailable due to a site issue" and were advised to try logging in again "in a few minutes".
WhatsApp, another Meta-owned platform, appeared to remain unaffected and continued operating normally throughout the disruption.
Some users who were able to access the Instagram app were greeted as though they had just created an account, receiving a message saying: "Welcome to Instagram". Others reported being unable to send messages or upload posts.
Meta maintained a relatively low profile throughout the incident and, at the time of filing this report, had not provided an official explanation for the widespread outage.
This was not the first major disruption affecting Meta's platforms. Users quickly compared the incident to the October 2021 outage, when a configuration error caused Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to go offline for nearly six hours. Meta later said the outage had been caused by a faulty configuration change in its network infrastructure, which unintentionally disrupted communication between its data centres.
Last month, Meta's social media platforms were also reported to be down for thousands of users.
Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2026
