MAJORITY of the Meta apps led by Facebook went back online after midnight, after scaring many Filipinos and other users that their account might be hacked.
On Tuesday before midnight, many Filipinos and users across the globe reported that they were logged out of their accounts and could not get in.
Richard Paul Catada, said he thought his account was hacked.
“I was changing passwords at that time when it happened,” he said.
But downdetector.com said that it happened to all users as a spike in outages for Facebook, Instagram and Messenger went up.
The Meta apps -Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger appeared to be experiencing technical problems.
Downdetector.com, a site that provides information about the online status of websites and social media platforms, shows the sites in red, with a massive spike in outages reported starting at around 11 p.m. Philippines time.
All three social networking services are owned and developed by Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook Inc.
Another app, Threads, the social network launched by Meta last year, have also reported outages.
Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
Minutes after the outage became trending, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone said the company is aware of the problem.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” he said.
Back online
Meta suffered a highly unusual outage of all its social media platforms on Tuesday with users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads locked out of their accounts.
At about 12:00 US east coast time (1700 GMT), the sites seemed to be returning to normal, about two hours after the outage reports first emerged.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X.
“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” he added.
According to the DownDetector website, reports that Facebook was down peaked at around 500,000 at 1530 GMT. Instagram peaked at about 70,000 reports at the same time.
Threads, the rival to Twitter that was launched in 2023, also suffered reports of outages, though WhatsApp, Meta’s messaging service, seemed spared.
Facebook suffered a similar outage in October 2021 which was attributed to technical issues, not a security hack as originally feared.
At the height of the incident on Tuesday, Facebook’s status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering “major disruptions” and that “engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.
On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.
Reports said that Meta’s virtual reality headsets were also suffering problems, with the device’s Horizon World platform not allowing users to sign in.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with three billion active monthly users.
Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.
X, formerly Twitter, saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.
“Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here,” wrote X CEO Linda Yaccarino, taking a dig at its rival.
US media focused on the fact that the outage took place on Super Tuesday, the day that millions of people were voting in primaries in 15 states and one territory.
