Meta outage hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp & more

The Conversation

Melbourne

A major outage is affecting users of popular social media and messaging services including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp around the globe. All these platforms are run by the social media giant Meta. As news of the outage spread, we learned that it affected almost all of Meta's products, including Messenger and Threads, as well as Meta's business products, such as Facebook Ads Manager and the Messenger API for Instagram.

Most services are beginning to come back online. But what went wrong, and what can we learn from this massive outage? The scope of the outage Outages have been reported from the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States and beyond. The outage was first reported in the US on Wednesday (around 12.30pm in New York, 5.30pm in London, or 4.30am Thursday in Sydney). Five hours later, Meta posted to X to say it was 99 per cent of the way to resolving the outage.

What might have caused it? At the moment, there has been no official word on the cause of the outage. However, we can make some educated guesses based on its scope. From reporting so far, the outage covered not only Meta's major social media platforms and messaging services, but also some of its business products. It also affected Meta's Login with Facebook service, which allows users to log in to third-party sites using their Facebook username and password. In other words, there seem to be very few Meta products this outage did not impact. That suggests that whatever went wrong was a single point of failure: something relied upon by all of Meta's services, without which the services can't function. These kinds of outages are rare.

That's because major internet platforms are designed to be highly reliable.The main way reliability is achieved is through replication. When you visit Instagram, for example, your computer connects to a server that sends back your Instagram feed. In fact, Instagram content is not stored on just one computer but is replicated across a massive array of computers known as a content delivery network (or CDN).

Practically all major web platforms, including news sites such as The Conversation, large companies, and online services such as YouTube and Google, use content delivery networks to increase the reliability and efficiency of their websites. Meta's outage comes in the wake of the major outage caused earlier this year by CrowdStrike's Falcon security software. Falcon's design meant it was deeply entangled with Microsoft Windows.