Netizens across the world on Wednesday reported facing outages on Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram. Meta services experienced outages primarily in New York and California, however, users in India also reported disruptions, suggesting the issue is with servers and is expected to be resolved soon.
The reports of Instagram and Facebook experiencing outages began to appear on the website Downdetector at around 7 pm (EST). Apart from Facebook and Instagram, Threads also faced disruptions, which was reflected only after 8 pm (EST).
Downdetector recorded numerous user inputs of Instagram and other Meta platforms experciencing issues over the past few hours. Moreover, some users reported issues with the services on X. Many Instagram users said that they faced a page with the message: "Something went wrong." The exact number of affected users remains unknown at the moment.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram reported a widespread outage earlier on March 5, this year.
The director of communications at Meta, Andy Stone acknowledged the technical glitch and issued an apology for the inconvenience due to the outage. The issue was resolved within a few hours.
The European Union initiated investigations into Facebook and Instagram recently concerning potential breaches of the bloc's digital regulations. These include allegations of insufficient safeguards against foreign disinformation prior to EU-wide elections. The European Commission has announced the commencement of formal proceedings to assess whether Meta Platforms, the parent company, violated the Digital Services Act. This act, aimed at safeguarding internet users and improving social media platforms, carries significant penalties of up to 6% of annual revenue for non-compliance.