No, It’s Not Just You: Facebook Is Down for Everyone

If you think it’s no fun being a Facebook user today, just thank your stars that you’re not technical staff at Meta.

Update: All of Meta’s sites that were affected by this outage appear to be functioning now. DownDetector reported that there were over 461,000 outages during the outage’s peak, with Instagram also having over 70,000 reported outages.

If you’ve suddenly been logged out of Facebook and your password isn’t accepted when you try to log back in, do youself a favor and don’t try changing your password. That’s not going to work either, because it’ll just result in an oops-something-went-wrong message, and might create more headaches for you later when Zuckerberg figures out what went wrong.

In other words, Meta has trouble, and the outage appears to be global, with one user on Downdetector indicating they’re having issues in Mongolia.

So far, press reports indicate that the issue affects Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and that the folks at Meta aren’t answering the telephone to talk about it right now. I guess they’re busy.

The outage evidently started at about 10 am, when users (that includes me) suddenly found themselves logged out of the site. When attempting to log back in, Facebook replies that the email and password are incorrect. On one browser here at FOSS Force, clicking “forgot my password” initiated a one-time PIN being sent via email, which then prompted an email change screen. Attempting to change the email then brought up a “something went wrong — try again later” screen. On another browser, Facebook said it sent a PIN via a text message that wasn’t received.

Meanwhile, over on TwitterX, some folks are having a good time with this, with @ChrisJBakke posting:

Facebook (162,985 engineers): currently down

X (184 engineers gathered around an open laptop that acts as our primary server): not down

I’m assuming that since FOSS Force has a Linux- and open-source-using audience that tends to be rather tech savvy, that I don’t need to reassure anybody or explain that the world isn’t coming to an end (well, it might be, but not because of this) and that the sky isn’t even falling. Most likely, some CI/CD person at Meta just accidentally created a situation that’s going to ruin the day for everyone at Meta from Zuckerberg on down.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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