On Wednesday evening, frustrated users flocked to X (formerly Twitter) to share their experiences regarding the disruption affecting the three applications owned by Mark Zuckerberg's tech empire. Downdetector reported significant spikes in outage reports, with Instagram seeing around 70,000 incidents and Facebook exceeding 100,000.
In a post on X, Meta acknowledged the problem, stating, "We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."
This is not the first time Facebook has faced such challenges; similar outages occurred in May 2024 and October 2021, both attributed to technical difficulties rather than security breaches. Users attempting to log into Facebook encountered issues even with the correct passwords, while Instagram users reported that their feeds were not refreshing.
Facebook remains the largest social media platform globally, boasting three billion active monthly users, while Instagram has approximately 1.35 billion users, according to recent statistics. The outage led to increased activity on X, as users sought alternatives during the disruption.
In Nigeria, as of 2021, there were around 33 million active social media users, with WhatsApp being the most widely used platform, having over 90 million users. Statista reports that 61.4% of Nigerian social media users are on X, 86.2% on Facebook, 81.6% on YouTube, 73.1% on Instagram, and 67.2% on Facebook Messenger.