Facebook and Instagram owner, Meta, has disclosed the reasons behind the global outage experienced by the social media platforms on Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

Millions of Facebook and Instagram users worldwide were unable to access them for about two hours on Tuesday.

The social media platforms were down for users across the globe from about 3 p.m. (Nigerian time) on Tuesday, but the sites appeared to be returning to normal about two hours later.

People trying to log onto the websites and apps were finding error messages and were unable to refresh their feeds as normal.

However, Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), attributed the global outage to a “technical issue”.

Stone said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.

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“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

He had earlier stated that “we’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now”.

Tracking website Downdetector indicated the outages had affected multiple countries.

Meta’s platforms are some of the most popular in the world. Facebook has three billion active monthly users, while Instagram is expected to hit 1.4 billion worldwide later this year.

Threads, its rival to Twitter, which was launched in 2023, also reported outages.

WhatsApp – which Meta also owns – was unaffected.

The biggest outage Meta experienced was in 2021 when founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption caused.

On that occasion, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services went down for almost six hours.

The Star