Facebook, WhatsApp Begin Restoring After Global Outage
Photo: Agamir Somoy
Meta’s major social media platforms briefly went down worldwide on Friday evening, disrupting services for millions of users on Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads. The services began returning to normal roughly an hour later.
Users started reporting issues around 7:45pm Bangladesh time. Many were unable to open the Facebook app, while others could not use the service even after logging in. Error messages such as ‘Sorry, something went wrong’ appeared on some user’s screens.
Reports on Downdetector, a platform that tracks global service disruptions, surged within minutes. Most complaints focused on problems with the Facebook app, while many users also reported login failures and website access issues.
The outage was not limited to a single country. Similar disruptions were reported from the United States, Canada, Romania, Myanmar, the Philippines, and several countries in the Middle East. As Instagram and Threads also experienced issues at the same time, the incident is being viewed as a large-scale technical disruption across Meta’s platforms.
Downdetector itself slowed temporarily as large numbers of users attempted to report the outage simultaneously.
Facebook and other Meta services began gradually returning to normal around 8:30 pm However, some users continued to face intermittent issues.
Meta has not yet issued an official explanation for the disruption.
Technology experts say even major online platforms occasionally face server or network-related failures. While Meta services have experienced similar large-scale outages in the past, the total number of users affected in this incident has not yet been confirmed.