Facebook and Messenger suffer global outage, millions logged out

Facebook and its messaging platform Messenger suffered a widespread global outage on Friday, abruptly logging out millions of users worldwide and preventing them from signing back in, according to multiple user reports and monitoring services .

What Happened?
Users attempting to access both the main Facebook app and Messenger were met with error messages. The Independent reported that affected users encountered a notice stating that "an unexpected error occurred" . Others reported seeing a generic "unknown error" message when trying to log in .

The outage emerged around 6:48 p.m. local time (approximately 6:48 AM Bangladesh time on Friday) and spread rapidly across multiple regions within minutes . Reports confirmed that users were automatically logged out of their accounts and could not regain access .

Which Services Were Affected?
The primary disruption impacted Facebook and Messenger. However, according to The Independent, other Meta-owned services such as Instagram and WhatsApp appeared to remain largely functional during this incident .

On the global outage tracking website Downdetector, reports of issues spiked dramatically within a short period, reflecting the scale of the disruption across multiple regions.

User Reactions on Competing Platforms
As Facebook went dark, users flocked to other social media platforms to share their experiences and confirm the outage. On X (formerly Twitter), reports accumulated tens of thousands of views within minutes.

One user posted: "Anybody else just been logged out of Facebook Messenger and can't log back in? Unknown error" — a post that garnered more than 96,600 views and hundreds of replies within minutes . Another user wrote: "Facebook down? Anyone experiencing this issue?"

Meta's Response
As of the time of this report, Meta Platforms Inc. has not issued an official public statement regarding the outage or its cause. The company does not operate a public-facing status page for its consumer products, though it maintains one for its business tools, which had not been updated to reflect the situation .

The company's head of communications has not yet acknowledged the issues on social media platforms.

Previous Outages
This is not the first major disruption to Meta's services. In a separate incident earlier this week, Facebook experienced service disruptions that affected Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace. The company blamed a "faulty configuration change" at its computing platform for that outage .

In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for nearly six hours due to faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between the company's data centers.