Users of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger awoke to confusion and frustration Thursday as a massive technical outage crippled access to the hugely popular social platforms.
Reports poured in from every corner of the globe of loading errors, login failures, and an eerie inability to connect with friends and browse feeds. Some Facebookers found themselves suddenly booted from accounts with no warning or recourse.
The outage also left many Instagramers in the lurch, as the photo-sharing app point-blank refused to launch for swaths of disappointed fans worldwide.
Initially, fearful their accounts had been compromised, users took to other sites like Twitter to voice outage reports and air worries. But experts assured these were likely symptoms of deeper issues within Meta’s digital plumbing rather than security breaches.
As the problem grew to impact hundreds of millions, the social empire seemed lifeless without its usual stream of updates, reactions, and real-time sharing. Independent monitors showed disruptions swallowing all major platforms simultaneously.
Curiously, Meta’s commercial dashboards painted rosy pictures despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary from actual users. WhatsApp managed to stay active even as its siblings stumbled.
With people reliant on these digital hangouts more than ever, engineers were under pressure to identify snags and restart the flow of connections. As night fell with services still ailing, many could only hope for relief from the social media blackout.
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