Users of Meta owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced temporary service disruptions on Sunday, with reports of connectivity issues emerging from multiple countries, including Pakistan, the United States, and Singapore. According to real time outage monitoring platform Downdetector, users encountered intermittent problems while accessing the platforms, although the disruption lasted for only a short period before services returned to normal. The incident added to a series of recent outages affecting Meta’s social networking services over the past year.
According to data published by Downdetector.com, reports from users in Pakistan began increasing at around 12:30 pm, indicating that Facebook was experiencing technical issues. The number of reported incidents continued to rise, reaching a peak of 196 reports at approximately 1:40 pm before gradually declining as the service recovered. By around 2:40 pm, the reported issues had largely been resolved. Instagram users in Pakistan also experienced similar disruptions during the same period. Reports for Instagram started increasing at approximately 12:30 pm and peaked at 204 reports around 1:29 pm, suggesting that both platforms were affected simultaneously. The outage monitoring service collects reports submitted by users from multiple sources to identify service disruptions in real time.
The temporary disruption was not limited to Pakistan. In the United States, Facebook users submitted 4,808 outage reports by approximately 12:45 pm, while Instagram recorded another 2,829 reports by around 1:18 pm from users experiencing difficulties with the application. Reuters also confirmed intermittent access to both Facebook and Instagram in Singapore during the disruption, indicating that the issue affected users across multiple regions. Although the outage was relatively brief, the widespread reports reflected the global reliance on Meta’s social media platforms for communication, content sharing, and digital engagement.
The latest disruption follows several previous incidents involving Meta’s online services. Last month, Facebook and Instagram were reported to be unavailable for thousands of users, with Downdetector recording more than 62,000 reports related to Facebook and over 8,000 reports involving Instagram. Earlier, in March 2024, Meta experienced one of its most significant service disruptions when Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users were unable to access their accounts for several hours due to a widespread outage. The recurrence of such incidents highlights the importance of maintaining reliable digital infrastructure as billions of users around the world continue to depend on these platforms for personal communication, business activities, and access to online information.
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