World-plus-dog Booted Out Of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Updated Those trying to log into Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for their social media fixes are facing panic this morning after being locked out of their accounts.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on the social media site formerly known at Twitter. X is still up and running, presumably much to Elon's delight.

"We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," Meta added on its status page in a post timestamped at 0717 PT.

Folks trying to log into Meta-managed accounts are told their passwords are wrong. Those trying to reset their password are told there's an error and to try again. Needless to say it isn't working, people are locked out, and it's basically an outage.

That's a lot of peeved users. - Click to enlarge

According to Downdetector, over half a million users logged complaints, a huge number given the reports are usually counted in the low thousands. The griping appears to have kicked off around 0700 PT (1500 UTC) and now appear to be dropping very slightly.

• AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee
• If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage
• Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

We'll update this article as the situation progresses though in the meantime don't panic - you haven't been compromised. On the balance of probabilities it's probably someone pushing the wrong button.

Let's not forget, we've been here before and these things sort themselves out (usually). ®

Updated to add

The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was holding pre-scheduled press briefings this morning on election security and naturally the outage was one of the first questions asked.

"We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage. But we are aware of the incident and the global scope of it," a CISA spokesperson said.

It's a big day for the US today: Super Tuesday, where 15 states elect delegates to decide which candidates will run for the presidency (Hint: It's Trump v Biden). The outage has already set conspiracy theorists all aflutter, and some cybercrime crews are claiming responsibility for a cyberattack against Meta, in both cases without any evidence.

Final update

All services now appears to be coming back online after a couple of hours of no access.

"We are recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused," Meta said at 0907 PT.

CISA, unsurprisingly as it turns out, commented: "We did not observe any issues out of the ordinary today."