Meta’s three major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, experienced a massive outage on the evening of the 5th, causing a significant drop in their stock price. Users were forcefully logged out, and their homepages displayed messages such as “unable to load posts” and “connection timed out.” The outage lasted for about an hour and a half, with service gradually resuming around 12:30 am. Meta’s stock price also plummeted by over 2% during this period.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, posted on the social media platform X half an hour after the outage, stating that they were “working on it.” Shortly after, he mentioned that the cause of the outage was a “technical issue” without providing further details: “Earlier today, users experienced difficulties using our services due to a technical issue. We have resolved this problem.”
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, Meta’s platforms started receiving a large number of problem reports after 11 pm, including reports from users in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UK. Facebook alone received over 300,000 reports, while Instagram received over 47,000.
This is not the first time that Facebook and Instagram have experienced similar incidents. Last year, in May and June, both platforms faced outages lasting around 1.5 to 2 hours, affecting an estimated 200,000 users each time. Meta apologized for the inconvenience and attributed the outages to “technical issues” without providing further explanations.
Editor: Lin Mei Xin