On Tuesday afternoon, Irish time, Facebook and Instagram faced serious technical difficulties, with users being unable to log in and news feeds freezing. These issues began to surface around 3.30pm. Interestingly, Google’s platform also exhibited login problems during this time, indicating a potential shared cause for these glitches in the systems of two major tech corporations that generally manage their own infrastructures.
Meta’s business status page highlighted several disturbances, including significant disruptions for the group’s admin centre and for Facebook login — a service facilitating user logins to third-party platforms using Facebook credentials. This has subsequently triggered blackout reports on numerous other websites.
At 4pm, Meta revised its entire status page to display an “unknown” status for all services except Messenger API for Instagram. Still, some Meta services, like WhatsApp and the Facebook Ads Transparency page, appeared to be functional. By 4.15pm, the Meta status page itself broke down.
Around 3:30 pm GMT, Google’s Ad Manager was reportedly disrupted, according to the company’s ads status page. Other issues are under investigation. However, Google’s problems seem less widespread than Meta’s, as most customer-facing services, including Search and YouTube, continue to operate trouble-free. Notably, a few commercial clients, such as The Guardian, were impacted due to problems with Google’s login service.
Potential root causes may involve systematic internet problems, with sporadic issues also reported on other platforms including X and Microsoft’s Teams.
These blackouts may not reach the scale of Facebook’s 2021 incident, when a setup error in an obscure protocol named BGP resulted in the company unwittingly erasing its own address from the systems permitting server intercommunications over the internet.
Despite immediately identifying the error, its rectification and implementation took several hours. This delay occurred partly because the company’s engineers lost remote access to their servers to fix the problem and their company passes were unable to get them physically through the electronic locks.
The Guardian has reached out to Meta and Google for their comments about these issues.