A major outage plunged social networking giant Meta's platforms into darkness, affecting billions of users worldwide on Tuesday (March 5). Meta-owned Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped functioning, causing widespread disconnection and frustration among users globally. Reports suggest that it took several hours before services were fully restored. The outage dealt a severe blow to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, not only in terms of user engagement but also financially, with experts highlighting the company's substantial losses.
Meta, saw its market value drop by 1.5 per cent due to outage issues affecting a portion of its 3.98 billion global users across its social media platforms. This decline amounted to a staggering $18 billion loss, which translates to approximately £14 billion, the media has reported. Notably, around 10 am ET (8:30 pm IST), a flood of issues were reported, coinciding with a 1.5 per cent drop in Meta's share price. However, this decline has since worsened, with shares falling by 1.6 per cent.
A statement read: “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Meta Spokesperson Andy Stone mentioned in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
All of Meta-owned social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered massive outage reminiscent of those experienced back in 2021, leading to a seven-hour outage. However, unlike the previous incident, this time the problem was resolved within two hours, reports said. A source within Facebook was quoted by saying as DailyMail.com that their internal systems were affected during the outage, with Meta's service dashboard indicating "major disruptions" across various services.
To recall, Instagram and Facebook experiencing a widespread service disruption on Tuesday evening (IST), leaving users nationwide unable to access the platforms. The outage triggered a wave of frustration among users who turned to alternative social media platforms, notably X (formerly Twitter), where they vented their frustrations through memes. Even X's owner, Elon Musk, joined in by poking fun at Meta.
Reports from outage monitoring service Downdetector indicate that the disruption began in India around 8:33 pm local time. As of now, there have been over 19,290 reports of outages from across the country.