Is Facebook offline? Meta warns of ‘major disruptions’ as thousands report outages

Tech & Gadgets

FACEBOOK owner Meta has confirmed that the social network is experiencing “major disruptions” due to a mysterious outage.

Thousands of users around the world were randomly logged out of Facebook and unable to log back in.

Meta says she is investigating the problem

Is Facebook offline?

A spike in reports was spotted by the Down Detector website just after 3pm UK time on March 5.

By 3.30pm, complaints had risen to more than 230,000 in Britain and more than half a million in the US, suggesting the outage is quite substantial and possibly global.

The bug causes users to log out of their accounts and when they try to log back in, an error message appears.

It says: “Cannot log in. An unexpected error has occurred. Please try to log in again.”

Meta did not reveal what caused the mass outage.

But the company has acknowledged the problems and posted a “major disruption” warning on its status website.

“We are aware of an issue affecting Facebook Login,” the company said.

“Our technical teams are actively working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

How can I check if Facebook is not working?

Those who may be experiencing issues with Facebook can check another social media app like Twitter for reports.

If you don’t have an X/Twitter account Down detector tells users when the apps are unavailable or experiencing issues.

If it appears that the problem is not widespread, check the internet connection on your device or quit the app before logging in again.

When have there been Facebook outages before?

Other Facebook outages have been reported in the past, including:

June 2014: Facebook was offline for about half an hour: the longest outage in four years.
January 2015: Facebook was down for about 40 minutes, impacting users around the world.
March 2019: A massive Facebook outage affected users around the world. Facebook was offline for about 14 hours, which is believed to be the largest outage any social network has ever experienced.
January 2021: Facebook experienced a bug that caused most users to be logged out of their mobile app.
March 2021: More than 60,000 users reported experiencing problems with Facebook, while 38,000 Instagram users also reported problems.
September 2021: Facebook users will no longer have access to their accounts.
October 2021: Facebook was one of dozens of apps that suffered outages
November 2021: Facebook malware affects user login and sharing.
April 2022: Facebook login issues, reportedly due to maintenance.
April 2022: problem for people trying to log in through the gateway.
August 2022: Only posts from celebrity pages appeared.