Meta outage

[solfox]

Seeing such a large web property go down like this is fascinating.

It's like a power plant grid failure, except for attention instead of energy.

When meta is down, a hoard of internet users desperately seek somewhere else to place their attention... But the system is designed with the expectation that meta will take all that traffic... And boom! everything starts falling over. Wild.

[ykonstant]

And rather than an indication that it is not working, I was just told to login again; since the attempts were unsuccessful, I was led to reset my password. Now I have no clue if the password has been reset properly or an old one is used, or login with google is used, or if I will continue to be logged out after they fix stuff.

If your service is down, please say "my service is down".

[jonnycomputer]

It logged me out and told me that my credentials were incorrect; I thought my credentials had been stolen, so I'm kinda personally glad that it seems to be happening to a lot of other people too. I know that's a bit selfish, but :shrug:

[mfrommil]

A much better UX would be clear error messaging informing users that the service is down and there is no problem with their individual account.

This would prevent people from panicking they've been hacked and/or unnecessarily resetting their password.

[KMag]

Yea, the wife came to me in a bit of a panic that her Facebook account got hacked. I tried logging in to FB to check if I had been unfriended, and I also got errors indicating my password was incorrect. My FB password is 96 bits from /dev/urandom in a GPG-based password manager I wrote for myself a couple decades ago. So, no my password wasn't wrong, and I'm not a big enough target for someone to put enough effort into figuring out how to snarf up my password data and crack my GPG passphrase.

Anyway, when FB thought my password was wrong I calmed way down. I thought maybe FB corrupted their password DB or something, so I just tried to reset my password, got into an odd workflow loop, and then quacked "downdetector facebook".

[NikolaNovak]

Yes. My spidey sense went off and I told my work I'll be off for an hour while I redo all my passwords... might still do that but glad to know it's not necessarily me getting hacked.

[smcl]

I called out some comment for being racist a little earlier (yeah I know, just report and move on...) and figured they'd managed to pwn my account somehow. Good to know it's not just me.

[kortex]

Same same. I went through the password reset flow (I was overdue anyways), it never sent anything to my SMS, so I did it again with email, reset the password and went to log in with the new password, "Incorrect password" error. Old password, also incorrect.

Didn't help that I had just posted a lukewarm spicy take on how linguistic prescriptivism is BS.

All the while the website felt like it was unstable, hard to describe, but it felt like it was bouncing around between URLs too much and reloading a lot.

Definitely feels like a botched update on their end.

E: Instagram is misbehaving as well, banner loads but big "Something is wrong" error on the feed.

E: now youtube has "Something went wrong" - WTF. I can't believe I'm saying this, but thank goodness for reddit and X[itter]???

E: interesting, seeing a big spike across multiple platforms on downdetector, including AWS: https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ I'm not able to log in right now, but that could be PEBCAK, I have too many saved IDs and I don't want to fail2ban myself

[101008]

I panicked the same. Even when I tried to recover my password, it said my email address wasn't associated to any account. I thought I lost it forever

[Twirrim]

Likewise, started password reset process that won't complete, asked my wife to double check my account wasn't compromised and posting cryptocurency crap or somesuch.

[alkonaut]

Yeah your product should NEVER confuse an auth service being down with a failed auth. This is really terrible by FB.

[srvmshr]

I have an active Instagram account. Today, coincidentally was the first time I thought of promoting my best few posts as an ad to improve reach to fellow photographers. Bad luck! The app now seems to be back online but my ads which were supposed to run for 48-72 hours, show <Disabled>. And there is a new "Pay Now" link, even though it was paid for and seems ad-spend is already showing it used some of that payment.

As an individual, this is pretty confusing. I don't have much to lose. I am glad I spent 10-15 bucks on favorite 2-3 posts only. I can imagine many others to be more affected. What is normally to be expected for SME users? Does Meta resume the ads automatically? Do they make good for the lost time since the clock seems to be ticking -- although no one saw any impression.

Edit: I submitted a ticket to Instagram Help and they responded by asking for a screencast video. The first time I sent, the video bounced. I have re-sent this by trimming the video.

Out of curiosity I want to know firsthand how Meta handles the small customers.

[MandieD]

Special bonus: today is Super Tuesday, which is when a large number of US states have their primary elections.

[1970-01-01]

Which one this time - BGP or DNS?

Either way, global GDP should be up :)

[dadver]

Sweden, logged out from all devices, Google authentication to reset password results in error. Authorization codes sent via SMS to reset passwords seems non-responsive. Authorization codes to reset password sent by e-mail works, but setting passwords results in set password page two times in a row and after second try "An unexpected error occurred. Please try logging in again."

[jph]

Facebook is throwing up the sign in page, as if your sign in has failed or someone's logged you out. Instagram and Messenger also seem to be affected.

[jzw8833]

Yes, just checked Instagram and it says “Couldn’t refresh feed” and is generally not loading. Messenger has also logged me out.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And Threads.

[buserror]

I can confirm that IRC still works! Pfewwwww..... /me takes his coat.

[corobo]

buserror has quit (*.net *.split)

[alliao]

/me put on my wizard robe

[op00to]

unless your bouncer is offline!

[daemonologist]

It seems to not just be Meta - sites like Downdetector[0] are showing a spike in reported issues from AWS, Google services, and X/Twitter as well. I noticed issues with Google myself.

[0] https://downdetector.com/

[jcwayne]

The sparklines on Downdetector's homepage can't be compared to each other. Spikes that look similar can actually have a difference of several orders of magnitude. Only meta's services have truly large spikes.

[magk]

Cloudflare reporting that they were implementing a fix for something SSO-related at 16:02.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

[vincnetas]

every one panicked that they got hacked. i got a slim hope that i also got hacked and that i will not bother to recover my account and just roll without FB :) im too week to quit my self.

[revscat]

Maybe post your password to Twitter or something. Let it escape into the wild, where it can be observed in its natural state.

[noman-land]

Send me your password and I'll log in and change it to nonsense. Get out of that heck hole.

[avgDev]

I tried logging in, I couldn't and was like "nice, I guess I want to have to look at garbage today".

I really would like a social network just for friends without all the garbage bloat.

[basch]

What would take Google and Facebook auth down at the same time? Coordinated 0day patch?

Or is the report of Google auth being down actually tied only to meta logins?

[drewg123]

I was wondering if Google was just melting down under a tidal wave of password reset emails from FB/IG..

My gmail seems to be working fine, both personal and work.

[jawns]

That's my best guess. And for them to log out every user in the world makes me incredibly curious about what would have happened if they'd chosen a different course.

[nayuki]

Note that this web page only covers the status of Meta's offerings for business users. This doesn't track the downtime of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. as normal users experience them.

[jeanlucas]

Curiously, WhatsApp did not suffer an outage in Brazil.

[notsahil]

Discord is having issues too! https://discordstatus.com/

[Shrezzing]

I think the downtime associated with other services could just be people choosing alternative sites for their social media time.

Facebook + Insta makes up a huge share of the social media market, and when they go offline, it'd be natural for their competitors to receive large sudden upticks in trafic they're not immediately prepared for on a Tuesday morning.

[wddkcs]

Could this be related to Google's log in page change? Seemed cosmetic only, but funny timing that Google's page update happens the same time all these log in issues pop up.

[montekristooGDB]

+

[MyFirstSass]

Anyone have a good guesstimate of how much money is "lost" when Youtube/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp (more?) are down each minute?

[twoquestions]

Thank you for posting, I'm glad you can generally find service status better here than status pages that never show downtime.

[usrusr]

For me it happened when my long-dormant messenger lighted up (for a perfectly valid reason, no surprise there) and made me go through those unbundling options presumably mandated by EU. Certainly a coincidence, but it does irrationally strengthen that satisfying feeling I get whenever I see the ad giant stumble.

[saturn5k]

Session timed out. I'm in Macedonia. In the quick login menu there was another person with name and profile photo beside my name and profile photo. It seems the girl was from my country, don't know her. I thought I was hacked. This is messed up.

IG is not working as well. Feeds, profiles, messages are all blank.