Social Media Meltdown: Instagram and Facebook Experience Global Outage
Social media giants Instagram and Facebook, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, are facing widespread service outages that have left users across the country struggling with inaccessible platforms. The outage on Tuesday evening sent frustrated users to alternative social media channels, particularly X (formerly Twitter), where some jokers voiced their grievances through memes. Even X owner Elon Musk hasn’t stopped taking a potshot at Meta.
According to Meta Communications Director Andy Stone, it is being fixed. Instant Messenger, also owned by Meta, seems to be working fine as we type WhatsApp.
According to the outage monitoring service Downdetector, the outage began at around 8:33 pm local time in India, and at the time of writing more than 19,290 termination notices from across the country.
The visual image provided by Downdetector’s outage map (screenshot above) shows Instagram’s extensive outage and the reported issues it causes. The map reveals that most of the problems were based on many major Indian cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Lucknow, Nagpur, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc. not viewing photos and profile pictures in the Instagram app in the 1990s.
Additionally, Downdetector’s data shows that the impact of these recent outages has gone beyond India, with Instagram users in several countries around the world also feeling the impact. Countries struggling with the crisis include Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Why have Facebook and Instagram gone down?
Meta has a dedicated page showing the current status of meta-business products, which shows a Major Disruptions label for services like Facebook, Graph and WhatsApp Business.
According to the Admin Center Status page, both Admin Center and Device Manager showed the same label. Several Meta employees told the anonymous messaging app Blind that they could not access their internal management systems, leaving them wondering if they had been fired.
X, previously had this breakdown of top trending topics on Twitter, with the platform's owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta saying "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are down."
Of course, in classic outage tradition, other users are also wolfing down to X to see if there's a real outage, or just expressing their frustration in hilarious memes.
Conclusion: As users around the world wait for the service to be restored, the outage raises a reflection on the role and impact of social media in modern life, and the vulnerabilities of our increasingly interconnected digital world of the 19th century.