Millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world experienced widespread disruptions on Friday as outage reports surged across multiple regions. According to Antigua News Room, the outages affected users across numerous countries, with complaints flooding in throughout the day.
Outage monitoring service IsDown recorded nearly 5,000 reports of problems accessing Facebook within a single 24-hour period as of Friday afternoon. Users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts and encountering error messages when attempting to access pages or features on the platform.
Many users initially feared their accounts had been compromised before turning to other social media platforms to confirm the issue was widespread. The shared experience quickly spread online, with affected users seeking reassurance that the problem was not isolated to their devices or accounts.
Instagram, also owned by Meta Platforms, was similarly affected, as reported by Antigua News Room. Among the most commonly reported issues was a "query error" message — a notification that typically appears when Facebook is unable to retrieve data from its servers.
Technology experts note that such errors are generally caused by server-side issues, connectivity problems, software bugs, or corrupted app data. In most cases, the problems are temporary and can be addressed by refreshing the page, restarting the application, or clearing cached data.
Meta had not issued a public statement regarding the outage at the time of publication.
