Facebook, Instagram back online after widespread outage

Users of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Threads regained access to the platforms Tuesday after a widespread outage took the sites down for hundreds of thousands of people.

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Meta, the parent company of the platforms, said it was investigating “major disruptions” that impacted its services on Tuesday morning. It was not immediately clear what caused the issues.

YouTube loading issues resolved, company says

Update 2:10 p.m. EST March 5: Loading issues reported Tuesday by YouTube users have been resolved, company officials said about two and a half hours after they first acknowledged the problems.

YouTube team members confirmed around 11:30 a.m. ET that they were working to fix the issues, which caused some users to see blank homepages and error messages. Just after 2 p.m., officials took to social media to share that “this is now fixed.”

It was not immediately clear what caused the issues.

Meta apologizes after widespread platform outage

Update 1 p.m. EST March 5: Officials with Meta apologized for the outage that brought down its social media platforms for hundreds of thousands of users on Tuesday.

“We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier,” company officials said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!”

It remained unclear what caused the issues on Tuesday. Meta said it is investigating.

‘Technical issue’ resolved after causing Meta platform outage, spokesperson says

Update 12:50 p.m. EST March 5: A spokesperson for Meta said a technical issue that caused the company’s social media sites to go down for hundreds of thousands of users has been resolved.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” spokesperson Andy Stone said.

Meta did not immediately share how many users were affected by the outage or say more about what caused the issues.

Investigating outage ‘the highest priority company wide,’ Meta says

Update 12:35 p.m. EST March 5: As Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Threads started to come back online for some users on Tuesday, Meta officials said their focus was on figuring out what caused the disruption.

“The team is actively investigating and it is the highest priority company wide,” the company said in an update posted online at 12:20 p.m. “We will keep you informed once we have fully completed the investigation, resolution and developed the Root Cause analysis.”

YouTube users also report issues

Update 12:15 p.m. EST March 5: Officials with YouTube said the video sharing platform was also experiencing issues on Tuesday after Meta platforms went down for hundreds of thousands of users.

It was not immediately clear whether the issues experienced by the two companies were related.

“We’ve seen reports of loading issues with YouTube, rest assured we’re working on a fix now!” members of the YouTube team said in a post on its support pages. The team acknowledged that some users were seeing an empty homepage and an error message and experiencing problems while scrolling YouTube Shorts.

Facebook, Instagram back online for some users

Update 11:50 a.m. EST March 5: Some Facebook and Instagram users said they were able to access the sites again about an hour and a half after reports first surfaced of issues on the sites.

Some users said they were able to access the platforms through their mobile apps but not the desktop sites. Others said they were still unable to access either platform.

Meta said in an update posted online around 11:50 a.m. that it was “recovering from an earlier outage affecting the ability to log in to our platforms.”

“Services are in the process of being restored,” the update read. “We apologize for an inconvenience that this may have caused.”

Meta spokesman: ‘We are working on this now’

Update 11:25 a.m. EST March 5: Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged issues with the company’s social media sites in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services,” Stone said. “We are working on this now.”

Tens of thousands of people reported issues using Instagram on Tuesday, while hundreds of thousands of people said they had issues with Facebook. The issue appeared to be impacting users worldwide.

Meta acknowledges issues with Facebook, Instagram

Update 11:10 a.m. EST March 5: Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, confirmed that engineers were working to resolve an outage that is causing “major disruptions” for users of its social media apps on Tuesday morning.

“We are aware of an issue users are having logging into our platforms,” the company said in an update around 11:05 a.m. “Our engineering teams are aware and we are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Tens of thousands of people have reported issues on Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messager and Threads.

Original report: As of about 10:15 a.m. ET, more than 125,000 people have reported issues on Facebook, according to the outage tracking site DownDetector. The site had more than 17,000 reports of outages on Instagram.

People trying to access Facebook found themselves logged out of their accounts on the desktop site. On mobile apps, users saw a message saying that their sessions had expired.

Instagram showed users a message warning that said, “Something went wrong” on the desktop site, while feeds were unable to be refreshed on the app.

Facebook Messenger also appeared to be down, with users seeing log-in screens on Tuesday. Thousands of people reported issues, according to Down Detector. Threads, which is also run by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta, was also down with users unable to access their homepages.

It was not immediately clear what might have caused the issues or how widespread they might be.

Check back for more on this developing story.

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