Following outages on March 5, Facebook and Instagram are now operational again. Users of the services complained that their Facebook session had been logged out and that Instagram was not loading.
Many began to fear that Facebook and Instagram had been compromised as a result of this. Is this accurate then? If not, what specifically transpired?
Facebook and Instagram Down
People started complaining that they couldn’t access Facebook and Instagram, two of Meta’s services, at roughly 10:45 a.m. EST. At 11:26 a.m. EST, I attempted to access Facebook on my MacBook, but I was prompted to log back in. I was getting the error “posts could not be loaded” when attempting to use the Instagram iPhone app.
There have been about 500,000 reports of issues on Facebook, and Down Detector indicated a mid-morning uptick.
Have Facebook And Instagram Been Hacked?
Have Instagram and Facebook been compromised, then? No, it doesn’t appear to be; there is a disruption affecting both services. According to Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, there could be a multitude of reasons why Facebook goes down, given its history of doing so. It is “very unlikely that this is a cyberattack, but adds that this” cannot be ruled out totally, he says.
Through X (previously Twitter), Facebook’s owner Meta verified the problem and stated that the company is “working on this now.”
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” a Meta spokeswoman informed me via email. We regret any difficulty caused, and we worked immediately to find a solution for everyone impacted.
Facebook And Instagram Down—The Reaction
Many people had nowhere else to go after Facebook and Instagram went down except to utilize X, which was once Twitter. Elon Musk, the owner of the social networking platform, responded to this with a gloating remark. “If you are reading this post it is because our servers are working.”
Some others wondered if they were being hacked and were relieved to learn they weren’t.
Experts Analyse The Meta Outage
After analyzing the Meta outage, experts from Cisco’s ThousandEyes Internet Intelligence team have provided more information about what actually transpired. Cisco is a software company.
The Thousand Eyes team, which keeps a close eye on thousands of services and networks throughout the world for performance and accessibility, believes that a backend service problem, like authentication, was probably the source of the Meta outage.
“ThousandEyes confirms that Meta’s web servers were still accessible, with clear network paths and web servers responding to users,” the investigators said on their blog. Nevertheless, error warnings were displayed to users when they attempted to log in, “suggesting a backend service, such as authentication, as the cause of the problem,” according to the researchers.
Around 8:50 AM PST, or 16:50 UTC, ThousandEyes noticed that a lot of users were able to access the application and that Meta services were progressively getting back up. Investigators noted that as of 18:40 UTC (10:40 am PST), the situation seems to have been rectified.
On March 6, some users reported that they were still unable to access their accounts, which may indicate that Facebook is still having problems. The majority of the problems seem to be related to a two-factor authentication (2FA) problem, and the website is not accepting SMS codes. I asked Facebook’s owner for an update on this.
Facebook and Instagram Security
You will still need to log in when you are able to access Facebook and Instagram again. When you do, you should start utilizing a password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden to strengthen your security. “When Facebook is back up and running, users will have the opportunity to log back in, but if they forget their password, they will be able to generate a new one-time password through a password manager,” Moore stated.
Additionally, you may strengthen security and keep hackers away from your Instagram and Facebook accounts by turning on two-factor authentication.
Updated at 03:20 EST on March 6. The initial publication of this story occurred on March 5 at 11:50 a.m. ITS T. Updated to add a news release from Meta and a study by the Cisco ThousandEyes team looking into the reasons behind the outage.