Meta’s two biggest social networks spent part of Sunday morning refusing to behave for a good number of the people who reached for them.
Facebook and Instagram both faltered on 19 July, greeting users with login failures, frozen feeds, and error screens that promised a fix was on the way without saying when it would arrive.
The trouble registered first on Downdetector, the service that aggregates user complaints, in the small hours of the US morning, at around 3.25am ET.
It carried the familiar signature of a Meta outage, the platforms half-working rather than fully dark, which is exactly the pattern that makes these events so maddening to diagnose from the outside.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!By the numbers people could see, Facebook drew roughly 4,808 reports in the US by 7.46am GMT and Instagram about 2,829 by 8.18am, according to Republic World.
