Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram recently faced a widespread outage. Several users across the globe were affected in this outage which lasted nearly two hours. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the latest outage has reduced the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg net worth by 2.2% which was nearly $3 billion.
Following the outage, the index showed that the 39-year-old tech mogul was worth $176 billion.However, Zuckerberg was able to retain his position as the world’s fourth richest person after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

How the outage affected users

Multiple services owned by the social media giant including Facebook, Instagram and Threads were down during the recent outage. Thousands of users in India and across the globe reported facing problems with Facebook and Instagram on X (previously Twitter).
Several users also took to the internet traffic monitoring website Downdetector to report their issues. As per the platform, the outage on Instagram and Facebook started around 7:32pm and peaked at 9:00pm yesterday (March 6).

The down time report indicates that nearly three and half lakh users reported the issues with Instagram. Meanwhile, a similar number of users complained about facing problems accessing Facebook.
User reports indicated that around 70% of users were facing issues with the Instagram app, while 27% reported issues with the feed and 10% faced issues while login. On the other hand, around 75% Facebook users reported issues while login into their Facebook account and 27% with the app and 10% with the website.
London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks took to X to reveal that four Meta platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads — experienced “outages related to login sessions in multiple countries.”

What Meta said about the outage

Acknowledging the issues on X, Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, wrote: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Later, in a separate post, Stone wrote: “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”