By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Millions of social media users across the world were on Friday suddenly logged out during a downtime moment in Meta-owned platforms – Facebook and Instagram, leaving users struggle to have access into their accounts.
Also affected during the disruption include, Facebook’s main website, mobile application and Messenger service.
Several attempts by many users to login using their unique details were met with error messages indicating that “an unexpected error occurred,” while visitors to Facebook’s website were shown a notice stating that the company was working to resolve the issue.
Users of Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, also took to their handles to inquire if other Facebook users experienced such automatic logout.
While Facebook and Instagram were the most affected services, WhatsApp appeared to remain largely operational despite sharing some backend infrastructure with other Meta platforms. However, some users also reported issues accessing Instagram’s website.
It is not clear how many countries were affected but the outage appeared to be global, as complaints also emerged from multiple countries within a short period.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, recorded a sharp spike in reports relating to Facebook and its products before the website itself experienced technical difficulties.
Meta has not publicly commented on the matter
