Fixed: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are back up

Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are back up and running following a sudden, widespread outage that knocked millions of users offline globally.

The disruption began around 7:21 PM Bangladesh time (9:21 AM ET) on Friday, with outage tracker Downdetector recording an immediate spike of over 100,000 reports within minutes. For a vast majority of users, the glitch manifested as a sudden, forced logout. Those trying to log back into their active sessions on both mobile apps and desktop browsers were blocked by persistent "session expired" or "an unexpected error occurred" loop messages, sparking initial fears among many that their accounts had been compromised, News.Az reports, citing FE.

Meanwhile, Instagram feeds failed to refresh, displaying a blank screen or a "Something went wrong" notice, while WhatsApp users experienced intermittent connection issues that left messages stalled.

With Meta's primary applications completely dark, users flooded alternative networks like X (formerly Twitter) to check if others were experiencing the same digital lockdown, briefly causing stability strains on major independent tracking sites due to the sheer volume of traffic. Reports indicate the blackout struck multiple regions simultaneously, hitting users across the US, UK, Canada, the Philippines, Myanmar, and West Asia.

Engineers appeared to isolate the backend issue relatively quickly. Services began stabilizing and filtering back online roughly an hour later, around 8:15 PM Bangladesh time (10:15 AM ET). As of publication, Meta has yet to issue an official statement regarding the root cause of the backend server glitch.

News.Az 

By Aysel Mammadzada