Facebook and Instagram have recovered after a brief outage disrupted access to the platforms for thousands of users in the United States on Sunday.
The disruption began at around 8:55 p.m. Eastern Time, with outage reports rising sharply on Downdetector, a website that monitors service disruptions based on reports from users and other sources.
At the height of the outage, more than 17,000 Facebook users reported problems, while Instagram recorded more than 5,000 reports, according to Downdetector.
Users reported difficulties accessing the platforms as the disruption spread, although the scale of the incident began to ease within about an hour.
By around 10 p.m. ET, reports on both platforms had fallen significantly, suggesting that services had largely returned to normal.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had not immediately responded to a Reuters request for comment on what caused the disruption.
Downdetector cautions that its figures do not represent the actual number of people affected because they are based on user-submitted reports. The number of users experiencing problems could therefore have been higher or lower.
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The latest incident comes after Facebook and Instagram suffered another outage in July. At the time, Downdetector recorded as many as 4,808 reports of problems with Facebook and 2,829 reports involving Instagram.
Temporary outages are not uncommon among major social media platforms, which operate large networks of data centres and other infrastructure to support billions of users globally. However, significant disruptions can quickly generate thousands of complaints as users turn to outage-tracking services to determine whether a problem is widespread.
Sunday’s disruption appeared to be short-lived, with both Facebook and Instagram largely restored later in the evening.
About the Author
Cecilia Attah is a tech analyst with a degree from Benue State University. She covers tech news and startups at TechRegard with a focus on how technology is transforming Africa and shaping the global landscape.
