Global disruption of Meta services hits Facebook, Instagram

The Vinh of Ha Dong District in Hanoi said at around 1 a.m. on Thursday he received a message notification on Messenger but was unable to view it as the app failed to load.

"Initially I thought it was due to an undersea fiber-optic cable issue or heavy nighttime gaming traffic slowing the internet.

When he tried to access other Meta apps, he found Facebook was accessible, though slowly, but Instagram displayed login errors. Many users reported being unable to access Messenger or Facebook on both phones and computers.

The number of error reports for Facebook on Downdetector surged at 1 a.m. on Dec.12 2024. Illustration by VnExpress/ Luu Quy

According to Downdetector, a tool that monitors the status of internet services, reports of issues began surfacing globally at around 12:30 a.m. Vietnam time and peaked at 1 a.m.. There were over 80,000 reports for Facebook, 66,000 for Instagram and more than 10,000 for Messenger and WhatsApp.

Unlike in March this year the outage did not cause a complete service disruption. Users experienced sporadic connectivity issues; some could not use the platforms on computers but managed to chat on their phones. Many users took to X to express their frustrations, causing hashtags like #facebookdown and #metadown to trend widely.

Users were unable to access several Meta services' sites early morning Dec. 12 2024. Illustration by VnExpress/Luu Quy

By 2 a.m. Meta's official X account acknowledged the issue in a statement: "We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

By 5:26 a.m. Meta announced that the recovery process was "99% of the way there - just doing some last checks." By 6 a.m. Instagram's X account confirmed that the issue had been resolved.

In March Meta's services were down for about an hour. A comparable event occurred in 2021 when its multiple platforms were inaccessible globally for six hours due to a "configuration error" in their system. In 2019 Facebook's web version also experienced a 24-hour connectivity loss.