Late on the night of 5 March 2024, hundreds of thousands of users worldwide were stunned when they realised that they’ve been booted out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts, and are unable to log back in.
At around 10PM Singapore time (10AM Eastern US time), Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, as well as their accompanying applications Messenger and Threads, experienced a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue.
The outage was then followed by a slew of reports from confused users filed to outage tracking website Downdetector.
At 11:29PM, there were a total of 13,083 local reports of problems with Facebook, with 75% of them about login issues. Facebook Messenger had 175 reports, Instagram had over 4,000, and Threads had 867 local reports on Downdetector as of 11:24 PM.
Meanwhile, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram globally.
The White House National Security Council was actively monitoring the incident and currently had no knowledge of any particular malicious cyber activity, according to a spokesperson.
Rival Social Media Platforms Gloat
For chronic sleep procrastinators, it was the worst nightmare come true, but as the saying goes, when one (or two, I guess?) door closes, another one opens.
Affected users naturally flooded to the only other social media platforms available, with the hashtag #facebookdown swiftly accumulating up to 73,000 posts on X, formerly Twitter.
Ironically, Meta spokesman Andy Stone took to his own X account, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Of course, owner of X Elon Musk had to take the chance to rub salt all over his competitors’ wounds as well.
At 12:12AM Singapore time, Elon posted mockingly, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
He also posted a meme of three Penguins of Madagascar each representing a Meta application, all saluting to a penguin representing X, with Andy Stone’s post in the foreground.
Lest you forget, X had also encountered multiple service disruptions following Musk’s US$44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in October 2022. An outage in December affected over 77,000 users across countries from the US to France.
(Funnily enough, I stayed on TikTok the whole time this was happening so I had no idea about the beef between Meta and X, or even that Meta was down in the first place.)
In 2021, Meta also experienced a significant outage that disrupted its services for hours. The outage resulted from a single incorrect command issued during routine maintenance.
“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally,” said Mr Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering and infrastructure at the time.
Fortunately, the affected applications were up and running by around 1:19AM on the morning of 6 March 2024.
Andy Stone, quoting his older post on X, writes, “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”.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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