At around 2pm on Friday afternoon, thousands of users across the UK and the world were met with error messages and blank screens as Meta’s suite of social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram and Messenger – suddenly became inaccessible. Within minutes, website Down For Everyone Or Just Me recorded a massive spike in reports, while Downdetector showed the number of Facebook complaints peaking at 17,237 at 2.46pm.
Users who had been logged out unexpectedly began to wonder whether their accounts had been compromised, as the outage sparked immediate hacking fears. Meta Communications Director Andy Stone acknowledged the disruption on X, saying the company was “aware people are having trouble accessing our services”. By 4.46pm, Stone confirmed that a “high disruption” was ongoing, particularly impacting Messenger. He later announced that the apps were “coming back”, but cautioned that it “may take a bit of time for everything to be fully back to normal.”
“Meta's Facebook, Instagram and Messenger suffered a major outage on Friday, affecting thousands of UK users.”
Meanwhile, Instagram users reported similar problems: 51% said the app was inaccessible, 28% saw an “Error Received” message and 21% struggled to log in, according to Down For Everyone Or Just Me. The outage also hit advertisers – Meta stated that an earlier issue “impacting ad delivery across our platform” had been “resolved” by late afternoon. Some users were able to reconnect to Facebook but found that features such as games were still not working. One person wrote on Downdetector: “Everything Meta was down, Facebook appears to be back now, but games aren’t yet.”
By early evening, the number of reports for both Facebook and Instagram had fallen dramatically, with Downdetector showing just 94 and 77 respectively. Stone reiterated that the services were recovering but warned that accounts might take a while to return to normal. The live blogs from The Mirror and Wales Online were closed after Meta confirmed the outage had been resolved across all platforms, though some users continued to experience delays.