Facebook and Instagram stopped working this afternoon, Tuesday March 5th, for a couple of hours. Thousands of users have reported problems accessing Meta's two main social networks.
An error page appeared on Instagram, the same on Facebook: "An unexpected error has occurred, please try logging in again."
On X #Instagramdown and #Facebookdown immediately became trending topics in Italy.
On downdetector.com, the site that monitors platform outages, a peak in reports was recorded starting from 4pm Italian time. According to Netblocks, disruptions were also seen across Messenger and Threads, with users reporting outages in multiple countries. No problems however on Whatsapp, the other Meta app.
The outage lasted a couple of hours, then everything returned to normal: first Facebook started working again, then Instagram.
Andy Stone, director of communications at Meta, apologized in a post on x: «Today a technical issue has caused difficulties in accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone involved and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.