Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are currently inaccessible, with users worldwide reporting a widespread disruption to Meta's services.

Facebook and Instagram users worldwide encountered difficulties accessing the platforms on Friday, with thousands experiencing login failures, loading issues, and service disruptions, in what seemed to be a widespread outage impacting Meta-owned services.

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According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, user reports surged across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger as the disruption spread through multiple countries, triggering alerts that indicated possible problems with both Facebook and Instagram.

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Downdetector described Facebook as a social networking platform owned by Meta, where users can share posts, photos, and videos, and characterized Instagram as Meta's photo and video-sharing platform featuring Reels, Stories, direct messaging, and live-streaming features.

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As the outage unfolded, users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts, encountering error messages, and struggling to reload feeds or access core features on both platforms, with reports also extending to Facebook Messenger and some business tools operated by Meta.

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Reuters reported that over 62,000 complaints were recorded for Facebook and more than 8,000 for Instagram during the peak of the disruption, although the actual number of affected users may have been significantly higher due to Downdetector's reliance on user-submitted reports.

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Meta acknowledged the issue through its communications director, Andy Stone, who wrote on X: "We're aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services, we're working on it."

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The outage sparked reactions across rival social media platforms, where users shared screenshots of failed login attempts and error messages while seeking confirmation that the problem was not limited to their accounts.

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The disruption is the latest in a series of outages to affect Meta's family of applications in recent years, with the company yet to disclose the cause of Friday's incident as of the time of filing this report.

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The situation remained under monitoring as engineers worked to restore full service across Facebook, Instagram, and other affected Meta platforms.