Meta Blackout: Widespread Outage Knocks Millions Off Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp

The disruption began around 7:15 p.m. IST, triggering a surge in complaints across outage-monitoring websites. Down detector recorded more than 100,000 reports within minutes, with users from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Philippines reporting widespread service failures.

The outage affected users across both mobile and desktop platforms in different ways. Facebook and Messenger users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts, while attempts to log back in resulted in error messages or blank screens. Instagram users encountered frozen feeds, failed story uploads, disrupted direct messaging services, and frequent app crashes. WhatsApp users also faced intermittent connectivity issues, with delayed message deliveries and synchronization problems on desktop versions.

With Meta lacking a public status dashboard for its consumer-facing applications, many users turned to social media platform X to confirm whether the disruption was widespread. The sudden influx of traffic also put pressure on independent outage-tracking services.

Meta acknowledged the service disruption and said its teams were working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible. However, the company has not yet disclosed the exact cause of the outage.

Technology experts have advised users not to repeatedly request password resets, emphasizing that the problem appears to stem from an internal server-side issue rather than any account compromise or security breach.

As restoration efforts continued, users across the globe awaited a full explanation from Meta regarding one of the company's most significant service disruptions in recent months.