Meta says technical issue behind recent outage

Global Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other Meta service outages was caused by a "technical issue," the company claims.

Hundreds of thousands of Meta users were impacted by a global service outage on March 5th. Several company representatives, such as Meta’s spokesperson Andy Stone, pointed to a “technical issue” behind the disruption.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta spokesperson said.

After news about the Meta outage broke, several attacker groups claimed responsibility for the disruption. According to cybersecurity firm Cyberint, three well-known hacktivist groups said they were behind the attack, namely, Skynet, Godzilla, and Anonymous Sudan.

The same groups took credit after OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its API faced “periodic outages.” The company later revealed that the disruption may have resulted from a cyberattack, as an “abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack” was registered.

However, attackers often take credit for service disruptions they had nothing to do with in order to inflate their perceived importance and capabilities.

Facebook and Instagram users could not access the social media platforms with the service logging many of them out. Using correct credentials prompted many users with an “incorrect password” message, sparking fears of a hacking event.

As the outage began, those using the service were kicked out of the platform. The issue impacted desktop and mobile users alike. The blackout hit over 550,000 users on Facebook and over 90,000 on Instagram worldwide, according to the website monitoring platform Downdetector.com.

In late 2021, Facebook went down for six hours after its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes were withdrawn from the internet. BGP works like a railroad switchman, deciding what tracks data packs should use to travel.

That meant that Facebook servers went missing because there was no one telling them how to get there. People were sending queries to Facebook, but they ended up nowhere.

Updated on March 7th [07:20 a.m. GMT]. The original version of the article incorrectly stated that Meta told Cybernews the outage may have been caused by a "security breach." The headline and the remaining paragraphs were updated with official Meta's comment to reflect the real situation.