Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook and Instagram, encountered widespread technical issues on Tuesday. Numerous users faced difficulties, such as being unexpectedly logged out of Facebook and encountering error messages like “Something went wrong. Please try again” upon attempting to log back in. Around 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5 (equivalent to 4:30 p.m. West African Time WAT), error reports surged, surpassing 500,000 by approximately 11 a.m., with 76% of Facebook users reporting login-related problems.

Instagram users also experienced issues, noting that their feeds weren’t refreshing, and posting on the platform was impossible. The outage extended to Meta’s Messaging platform and Threads, the Twitter-like app launched the previous year. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the problems on X (formerly Twitter) at 10:52 a.m. ET, 4:52 p.m. WAT, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

By 10:17 a.m. ET, 4:17 p.m.  WAT, the Facebook Login Status page reported “major disruptions,” assuring users that engineering teams were actively addressing the problem. An update at 12:07 p.m. indicated that Facebook Login services were being restored. Elon Musk, the tech mogul who owns X, took a dig at Meta during the outage, humorously noting on X, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” The main @X account also playfully acknowledged the situation, subtweeting, “we know why you’re all here rn.”

This outage echoed a similar incident in October 2021 when Meta (then Facebook) faced a global outage lasting about six hours, affecting Facebook, Instagram, and other apps. A company executive attributed the problem to a “faulty configuration change” on backbone routers coordinating network traffic among data centers. The October 2021 incident marked the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service experienced a 24-hour outage across multiple apps.