© 2026 WGCU News
PBS and NPR for Southwest Florida
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Facebook, Messenger and Instagram outage reported; service restored after noon

WGCU | By WGCU Staff
Published March 5, 2024 at 11:16 AM EST
File
/
WGCU

Meta's social media platforms — Facebook, Messenger and Instagram — were apparently offline Tuesday morning for more than an hour in a massive outage.

The platforms returned to service shortly after noon. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted on X, formerly known as Twitter, "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

News media around the world were reporting the outage with stories of users accounts suddenly going offline and attempts to reconnect thwarted.

News Channel 8 in Tampa was reporting Meta’s social media platforms not working, with both Instagram and Facebook pulling up “failure to load” error pages. Stories in England's The Independent, Fox2 in St. Louis, Mo., and other sites all reported the down platforms.

The service monitoring website DownDetector Tuesday repoerted more than 520,000 outages around 11:15 a.m. and posted a message on its site saying "User reports indicate problems at Facebook."

Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.


Before12:30 most accounts had been returned to service with DownDetector reporting an outage in the 15 to 17,000 range instead of more than 500,000.

A senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.”

The outage comes just ahead of Thursday’s deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.

In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Tags
Public Affairs WGCU NewsSocial MediaFacebook
WGCU Staff
See stories by WGCU Staff
Trusted by over 30,000 local subscribers

Local News, Right Sized for Your Morning

Quick briefs when you are busy, deeper explainers when it matters, delivered early morning and curated by WGCU editors.

  • Environment
  • Local politics
  • Health
  • And more

Free and local. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

More from WGCU
  • Environment
    Coping with Winter Cold
    Dr. Jerry Jackson
    Animals in south Florida don’t have to worry much about winter cold – and indeed many migrants from areas farther north find suitable living conditions here. But, a trip to the beach or on a rare blustery day sometimes makes one wonder. How do ducks, herons, egrets, and other birds tolerate wading or swimming in cold weather? Aquatic birds, for example, have bare skinny legs with leg muscles placed among insulating feathers.Blood vessels going to and from the very few muscles in the legs and feet lie right next to one another, and cold blood going back into the body is warmed by warmer blood coming from the body – and is nearly the same temperature as the blood circulating in the well-insulated body.
  • The eagle family in total. F23 and M15 roll the un hatched egg and aerate the nesting bole while E26 waits to be fed. It's more than likely the second egg is no longer viable.
    Environment
    Failure of second eagle egg a certainty; many possibilities for no hatch
    Michael Braun
    It's nearly a certainty that E26 will be an only eaglet. The second egg is days past the 40-day benchmark for a successful hatch and the hope for a "Christmas Miracle" has come and gone like so much holiday gift wrapping. Breeding pair F23 and M15 can be seen on the Southwest Florida Eagle Cam as they continue to dutifully roll the egg. But it's probable that their ministrations will be for naught. They are also dutiful in their care and feeding of E26 with the fuzzy little chick continuing to thrive and grow.
  • Snow is seen piled up on the field before the Pinstripe Bowl NCAA college football game between Clemson and Penn State at Yankee Stadium Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Adam Hunger)
    Weather
    Winter storm snarls U.S. holiday travel across Northeast, Great Lakes; flights cancelled at RSW
    The Associated Press
    More than a thousand flights were canceled or delayed across the Northeast and Great Lakes as a winter storm disrupted one of the busiest travel weekends of the year between Christmas and New Year's. As of Saturday morning, New York City had received around four inches of snow, under what some forecasts predicted, but at least 1,500 flights were canceled from Friday night into Saturday, according to FlightAware. Major New York–area airports warned of disruptions, while the National Weather Service cautioned about hazardous travel conditions, possible power outages and tree damage. States of emergency were declared for New Jersey and parts of New York.