More than 2-hour Facebook & Instagram outage on 5 March was due to technical issue

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Over 2-hour outage on Facebook & Instagram attributed to technical issues

On Tuesday (5 March), both Facebook and Instagram became inaccessible for more than two hours, in an outage that affected users globally.

After connectivity was restored, Meta emerged to explain that the incident was due to a technical issue.

Facebook & Instagram suffer power outage on 5 March

Reuters reported that the disruptions to services on both platforms started at around 10am Eastern US Time (ET) and lasted for more than two hours.

Users took to X to share that they had been signed out of the platforms and were unable to log back in.

Outage tracking website Downdetector shows that reports of disruptions to Instagram’s services surfaced after 11pm on 5 March (Singapore time).

At the peak of the outage, there were about 7,501 reports.

Source: Downdetector

Meanwhile, for Facebook, Downdetector shows that reports of disruptions emerged at around the same time as well, reaching a maximum number of about 18,949.

Source: Downdetector

As for Facebook messenger, 306 outages were reported at the peak of the disruption.

Source: Downdetector

Meanwhile, Threads and WhatsApp, both of which are under Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — reported outages too, albeit on a smaller scale.

70 outages were reported for WhatsApp at the peak of the disruption according to Downdetector while Reuters stated that users experienced issues with Threads.

Source: Downdetector

The reports of outages for the services slowed down sometime before 2am.

Meta spokesperson attributes outage to technical issue

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone took to X to address the outage on 5 March.

Source: @andymstone on X

He wrote: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

At the time of writing, most of the issues faced by Meta’s services have been resolved, according to the firm’s status checker. These services include the Meta Admin Centre, Facebook login and Messenger Platform, among others.