After a short downtime on March 5, Facebook and Instagram are working their way back online. People had trouble opening Instagram at this time, and they were also logged out of their Facebook accounts without warning.
Many people were scared when the service went down, which made them worry that their Facebook and Instagram accounts might have been hacked. So, do these worries have any truth to them, or is there another way to explain what happened?
Facebook and Instagram Down
Meta’s services, like Facebook and Instagram, started having problems around 10:45 a.m. EST, when users started having trouble getting into the apps.
When I used my MacBook to try to log in to Facebook at 11:26 a.m. EST, I was asked to do it again. In the same way, the Instagram app on my iPhone wouldn’t load and showed a message that said it “couldn’t load posts.”
A spike on the Down Detector during the middle of the morning shows that about 500,000 Facebook users have reported problems.
Have Facebook And Instagram Been Hacked?
So, have hackers broken into Facebook and Instagram?
It looks like not. Instead, there is a problem with both systems. Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, says that Facebook has a history of going down.
This could be caused by a number of different things. He says that even though it’s “highly unlikely to be a cyberattack,” it’s important to remember that it “can never be fully ruled out.”
Meta, the owner of Facebook, confirmed the problem through X, which used to be Twitter, saying that the company is “working on this now.”
I got an email update from a Meta representative saying, “Earlier today, a technical issue made it hard to access some of our services.” We immediately fixed the problem for everyone touched, and we’re sorry for any trouble this may have caused.
Facebook And Instagram Down—The Reaction
Many people turned to X, which used to be called Twitter, to get their social media fix while Facebook and Instagram were down.
Elon Musk, the site’s owner, joked about this: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
Experts Analyse The Meta Outage
Analysts from Cisco’s ThousandEyes Internet Intelligence team have looked into the Meta failure and given a more complete account of what happened.
The ThousandEyes team, which checks the availability and performance of many services and networks worldwide, says that the Meta failure was probably caused by a problem with a backend service, such as authentication.
“ThousandEyes confirms that Meta’s web servers remained reachable, with clear network paths and responsive web servers,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. However, users who tried to log in got error messages that pointed to a central service, like authentication, as the most likely source of the issue.
Around 8:50 a.m. PST (16:50 UTC), ThousandEyes saw Meta services slowly start to work again, and many users were able to access the app again. Researchers said that by 18:40 UTC (10:40 am PST), the problem seemed to be completely fixed.
But on March 6, some users said they were still having trouble getting into their accounts, which suggests that Facebook may still be having problems. Most of these issues seem to be linked to two-factor authentication (2FA), especially the fact that SMS codes don’t seem to work on the site. I asked the boss of Facebook what was going on and didn’t hear back.
Facebook and Instagram Security
Users will need to log back in to Facebook and Instagram once they can again. To make your protection stronger, you should use a password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden.
Jake Moore says that when Facebook gets back up and running, users can use a password manager to make a new, unique password if they choose the “forgotten password” choice when they log in.
You can make your security even stronger by using two-factor login to protect your Facebook and Instagram accounts from hackers.
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