How to turn detective in Meta Outages
If you were scrolling on Facebook or Instagram on the 5th March and all of a sudden you found yourself suddenly booted out, and quite frankly, a bit bamboozled, rest assured, you were not the only one. We were affected too. If you hadn’t noticed, Meta technologies (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and more) were recently hit with a major outage, followed by another minor one, in the space of just one week. You may have been tending to business matters, managing Meta Ads, creating a killer piece of social media content, dealing with a business inquiry in Messenger, or just taking a nosey into what Sandra ate for her lunch that day, the service interruption was spread worldwide and caused some chaos. It made breaking news very quickly and panicked a high number of internet users.
And that wasn’t even the end of it. It’s quite possible that after being kicked out of Facebook, when you attempted to log back in as normal, you were told that your password was incorrect. Shock horror. Even trying the ‘forgot your password’ function was not quite cutting it. Maybe your Instagram feed wouldn’t refresh, leaving you questioning whether your internet connection was abysmal. In the heat of the moment, you may have worried that your account had been hacked. Don’t let Meta make you think this was anything that you had done, we know this came as a result of Meta downtime and it wasn’t the first time.
The last major outage happened in 2021, leaving platforms down for 6 hours. It rocked the world so much so that it even has a dedicated Wikipedia post, with the location set to ‘Earth’. The recent outage definitely did wonders for other platforms though, we can see a great influx of social users flocking to X (the former Twitter) it appears to be GIFs and memes galore, all at Meta’s expense. I mean it was to be expected, the trending topics were ALL relating to the Meta outage.
If you have suspicions about Meta services and wish to do your own detective work, then we would normally point you towards the ‘Meta Status‘ centre. However, the latest outage caused that to go skewwhiff also! Not very reassuring but usually works like a treat.
Our second, but perhaps just as good, resource has to be Down Detector. It’s a handy website to bookmark in the event of outages across any of your favourite services, Netflix, Nationwide and Gmail to name a few. You will get updates on the top reported problems, and its live discussions might help alleviate (or share) frustrations at not being able to get access to your favourite sites. Tips offered on this page offer varying degrees of success, however it is a good place to start your investigations!
There you have it, two websites that we suggest you bookmark in preparation for any outages or states of disbelief you have over future issues with social platforms. We know how important it is to have access to all your platforms and how stressful it can be when they go down without explanation. For any outage worries, or any technical support requests, please raise a support ticket via our website.