Facebook and Instagram suffer second major outage in days

Instagram and Facebook went down for the second time in a week on Monday, leaving thousands of users shut out of their accounts.

The social media apps, operated by Meta, last went down for nearly three hours last Tuesday, March 5.

At lunchtime today both apps suffered a sudden outage, with almost 2,000 users across the country reporting issues on Down Detector, including in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.

Users reporting Facebook issues flagged problems logging in, with both the website and app affected. Last week’s outage also left people unable to login.

However, the issues appeared to be quickly resolved, with reports dropping off within the hour.

Last week’s outage appeared global, affecting millions of users worldwide.

Many users took to X, formerly Twitter, to complain about the problem – and as is often the case, were concerned they had been hacked.

Ann Autumn wrote: ‘My hands are shaking so much right now I can barely type. And my heart is pounding. I couldn’t get into Facebook and I was sure that my account was hacked. But Twitter peeps are confirming the #facebookdown situation. #instagramdown as well. So relieved that it’s not just me.’

Maham Khattak, based in Australia, wrote: ‘Anyone else’s #Facebook logged out? Can’t log back in, keeps saying session expired or unexpected error?’

Users in the US, Brazil, India and Guatemala were among those who reported issues on X. #instagram down was trending.

This is a developing news story, more to follow soon… Check back shortly for further updates.

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