Meta Platforms Inc. experienced an outage this morning that made Facebook, Instagram and Threads inaccessible worldwide for about two hours.

The first user reports of downtime started emerging around 10 a.m. EST. Meta confirmed the outage shortly thereafter, stating in a note on its status page that “we are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

The outage left Facebook users unable to log into their accounts. On Instagram, users who were already signed in lost the ability to refresh their feeds. Threads, Meta’s newest social media property, displayed an error message that read “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.”

At least one of Meta’s consumer hardware products was affected as well. Some users of the Meta Quest virtual reality headset reported that they were unable to get past the device’s login interface. 

Meta posted a second update to its status page at 12:07 p.m. The company informed users that it’s “recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored.” The recovery effort is still ongoing.

The outage follows a similar incident in late 2021. Like today’s service disruption, it began on a Tuesday morning and lasted for several hours. The outage took Facebook and Meta’s other flagship platforms offline along with its virtual reality headsets.

The 2021 incident wasn’t the result of an issue with Facebook Login like today’s service disruption but rather a networking error. In a blog post released at the time, Meta detailed that a faulty network change disconnected its data centers from one another. In the process, the network interruption disabled access to Meta’s DNS servers, which is what ultimately caused the outage.

The company experienced another large-scale service disruption in 2019. That incident, Meta’s worst-ever outage up to that point, took more than 24 hours to resolve. After rolling out the fix, the company detailed that the disruption was caused by a faulty server configuration change.

In conjunction with today’s Meta outage, at least two other major online platforms experienced technical issues. It’s unclear if the incidents were connected. 

Around 10:50 a.m. EST, some users of the online community platform Discord reported difficulties logging into their accounts. Others were unable to load messages. TechCrunch reported that the company fixed the issue within a few hours.

YouTube also experienced technical problems, but on a more limited scale. Google LLC disclosed this morning that some users encountered error messages and slow loading times. The search giant has since resolved the issue.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons