Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads logins restored after widespread outage

A technical issue has caused widespread login issues for a few hours across Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms early this morning.

Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.

Andy Stone, Meta's head communications, acknowledged the issues on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience," he said.

A senior official with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters the agency was "not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage".

London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks said on X that four Meta platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads – were "currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries".

London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks said there was no sign of "country-level internet disruptions or filtering", which are typically imposed by governments.

Cybersecurity expert Matthew Green said the outage appeared to go beyond Meta.

"There are a number of services having trouble with at least parts of their systems, particularly the ability to log into websites," said Green, an associate professor of computer science and member of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, before the platforms were restored.

"This may indicate a common cause, like a failure at a major cloud services provider. At the moment nobody knows exactly what's happening."

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The outage came just ahead of Thursday's deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act.

To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can't be combined to target them with online ads. It's not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.

In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.