Meta owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced temporary service disruptions on Sunday, with users in Pakistan and several other countries reporting difficulties accessing the platforms. The brief outage was tracked by real time monitoring platform Downdetector, which collects user submitted reports to identify service interruptions. While the disruption affected a limited period, users experienced intermittent access to both platforms before services gradually returned to normal. Similar reports also emerged from other regions, indicating that the issue extended beyond Pakistan.
According to Downdetector, users in Pakistan began reporting problems with Facebook at approximately 12:30 pm. Reports continued to increase before reaching a peak of 196 complaints at around 1:40 pm. The service gradually recovered, with the reported issues largely resolved by approximately 2:40 pm. Instagram users also started reporting access problems at around 12:30 pm, with outage reports rising rapidly and reaching a peak of 204 reports at approximately 1:29 pm. The monitoring platform compiles information from users and multiple data sources to identify potential service interruptions, making it one of the most widely referenced tools for tracking online platform availability.
The disruption was not limited to Pakistan. In the United States, Downdetector recorded more than 4,800 reports from Facebook users by around 12:45 pm, while over 2,800 Instagram users reported problems by approximately 1:18 pm. Reuters also confirmed that access to Facebook and Instagram was intermittent in Singapore during the same period, suggesting that the issue affected users across multiple international markets. Although Meta did not immediately provide details regarding the cause of the disruption, services appeared to stabilize within a relatively short period and user reports declined as normal functionality returned.
The latest disruption follows several previous incidents involving Meta’s social media platforms. Last month, Facebook and Instagram experienced another outage that generated more than 62,000 user reports for Facebook and over 8,000 reports for Instagram, according to Downdetector. In March 2024, Meta also experienced a significant global service disruption that temporarily affected Facebook, Instagram and Threads, leaving users unable to access their accounts for several hours. While Sunday’s outage was considerably shorter in duration, it highlights the continued reliance of millions of users worldwide on digital communication platforms and the widespread impact that even temporary service interruptions can have across different regions.
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