Another Outage? Meta-Owned Facebook & Instagram Down In India

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram suffered a major outage in India, and the world over, on Tuesday (March 5) evening.

As per DownDetector, reports of Instagram and WhatsApp outages began to trickle in around 08:45 PM IST. As per the tracker, there were more than 3 Lakh reports of outages for Facebook and another 40,000 for Instagram.

As per Meta’s status dashboard, the social media juggernaut’s other services were also hit by the downtime. While the application programming interface (API) for WhatsApp Business was facing “major disruptions”, offerings such as Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite as well as Facebook and Instagram Shops were also hit. 

Netizens complained about a slew of issues with the platforms. While many faced issues with logging in on Facebook and Instagram platforms, others were abruptly logged out. While many were unable to refresh their feeds, others complained that they were being directed to change their passwords. 

“Users report disruptions using both social media platforms. Instagram, Facebook and Messenger are down. All the social media platforms owned by Meta are down in India and the US,” said a user online. 

Meanwhile, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the outage. In a post on X, Stone said, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

Interestingly, as per DownDetector, WhatsApp and Threads were also hit by outages. However, the number of outages reported for them was much lower – about 200 each.

As per Reuters, several employees of Meta, on anonymous messaging app Blind, said they were unable to log in to their internal work systems.

This was not the first time that Meta was hit by an outage. In April last year, some Indian WhatsApp users were left in the lurch as they were unable to download videos on the app. Prior to that, WhatsApp suffered a two-hour service outage in October 2022, which forced the company to issue a clarification to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

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