On Friday, thousands of users were suddenly logged out of Facebook and Messenger, with many immediately fearing their accounts had been hacked. The problems began around 2:45pm BST (9:45am ET / 6:45am PT), as blank feeds, failed login attempts and unexpected recovery prompts spread rapidly across multiple countries.
Downdetector recorded more than 110,000 reports at its peak in the US alone. Panicked users rushed to reset passwords or turned to X to check whether others were affected, only to discover it was a widespread outage. Services were restored across Meta platforms a few hours later, though the company has yet to issue any official statement on the cause of the disruption, which some users have called the 'biggest worldwide crash of all time'.
