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By Amanda Castro and Hannah Parry
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Instagram and Facebook were hit by a sudden, widespread outage Tuesday evening, leaving users across the globe unable to load feeds, view profiles or refresh new posts as both platforms began throwing error messages.
Parts of each app continued to function, but users reported that features would abruptly fail, feeds would freeze, and login attempts would stall before returning generic server‑side errors. On Instagram, new photos refused to load and some profiles appeared blank; on Facebook, pages stalled or refreshed into error screens.
The disruption began around 5 p.m. ET, according to outage‑tracking service DownDetector, which showed a sharp spike in problem reports from the U.S., U.K. and dozens of other countries.
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By around 5.39 p.m., more than 16,000 people had reported that their Instagram accounts were down, with more than 18,000 reporting Facebook outages at the same time. Many of those users described being met with a “5xx Server Error” message.
Newsweek has reached out to Meta for comment via email. The tech giant has not yet acknowledged the outage.
It is the second major outage in two weeks after a June 12 incident left millions of Instagram and Facebook users locked out of their accounts and experiencing widespread technical disruptions.
Users across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the Middle East reported being logged out of their profiles, greeted by blank feeds, or met with repeated “unexpected error” and “query error” messages. The disruption severely impacted Facebook’s desktop site, its mobile application, Messenger, and portions of Instagram’s feed and login systems. At its peak, Facebook generated more than 113,000 outage reports while Instagram received around 10,000. Meta confirmed at the time that it was working to fix the issue, without revealing the technical cause.
What Is A “5xx Server Error” Message?
A 5xx server error is a type of HTTP status code that means something went wrong on the website's server, rather than on a user's device or browser.
The "5" indicates a server-side problem, while the last two digits identify the specific issue.
It is not yet clear what the exact cause of the message was, but potential causes can be server overload from too much traffic, database failures or network issues between servers.
What Parts of Instagram And Facebook Were Down?
For both Instagram and Facebook, the apps were the most impacted by the issue, followed by the feed and timeline, according to DownDetector.
Instagram also experienced problems with its server connection, while Facebook's website was down for some users.
Similar outages to Meta properties in the past have been caused by AWS failures, server‑side glitches, and large‑scale Meta infrastructure issues.
When Did Service Return to Facebook and Instagram?
The vast majority of users reported that both Facebook and Instagram were back up and running by 6 p.m., with service appearing to resume to normal by 6.15 p.m., according to DownDetector.
Historically, global outages of this scale are typically resolved within one to three hours. Meta’s engineering teams typically deploy fixes in waves, meaning some regions regain access sooner than others.
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