Facebook and Instagram platforms suffered a widespread technical glitch on Sunday, after thousands of users around the world were surprised by a sudden service outage, which included login failure, homepage updates stopping, and repeated error messages appearing on both platforms.

Reports began to escalate from the early morning hours, as data from the outage monitoring site Down Detector showed a sharp rise in complaints within minutes, while problems extended to a number of services of Meta, the company that owns both platforms.

Error messages and sudden logout

Facebook web users encountered a message stating that the account is 'temporarily unavailable due to a site issue,' while login attempts failed for a large number of users, and others experienced automatic logout from their accounts on mobile apps and the website.

The glitches extended to the main pages on Facebook and Instagram, as posts stopped updating or loaded very slowly, while users reported disruption of sending messages via Messenger and difficulty loading photos and videos, making the daily experience on both platforms almost halted.

Meta's silence increases ambiguity

As of this writing, Meta has not issued any official statement explaining the cause of the glitch or specifying a timeline for full restoration of services.

Although the company's business-oriented service status dashboards showed that some APIs and business services continued to operate, the user-facing platforms continued to suffer notable disruptions, prompting millions of users to turn to platform X to exchange information and follow the latest updates on the sudden outage.