The Facebook server was down on 5th March, 2024, when a technical problem caused a widespread outage for Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, impacting access for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide for over two hours.
Around 8:30 pm (IST), the disruption started, as users on rival social media platform X began reporting difficulties accessing their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
The White House National Security Council confirmed it was closely monitoring the situation, asserting that there was no evidence of any particular malicious cyber activity at that moment. During the peak of the outage, Downdetector.com recorded more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram. In a statement on X, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the technical issue without elaborating on its specifics.
Meta’s shares experienced a 1.2% decline during afternoon trading due to the outage. The company did not promptly respond to requests for further information regarding the Facebook server down glitch.
With approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its range of platforms, which includes WhatsApp and Threads, Meta’s status dashboard also highlighted problems with the WhatsApp Business application programming interface.
Nevertheless, according to Downdetector’s data, which consolidates outage reports from multiple sources, the effect on WhatsApp and Threads was relatively minimal when the Facebook server was down.
Meta employees raised concerns on the anonymous messaging app Blind, with some reporting challenges logging into internal work systems and discussing the possibility of layoffs.
The outage swiftly became one of the top trending topics on X, where platform owner Elon Musk made a playful remark at Meta’s expense. He suggested that if users could read his post, it was because X’s servers were up and running.
Since Musk acquired X in October 2022, the platform itself has encountered several disruptions, including a December outage that impacted over 77,000 users across various countries.
