Facebook hit a wall on Tuesday afternoon, with thousands of users across the globe finding themselves staring at error messages instead of their feeds. The trouble started around 4 pm Eastern Time on March 3, and by 5:32 pm, Downdetector had logged more than 11,000 outage reports in the US alone. Users in Canada, Brazil, Pakistan, Poland, Italy, and the UK piled on with complaints of their own shortly after.
Most people trying to load Facebook on desktop were greeted with a blunt message: “Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly.” Some found the mobile app still functional but painfully slow, while others couldn’t log in at all. About two-thirds of US users flagged website issues, with another 28% unable to access their accounts entirely.
Advertisers felt the pain as Ads Manager, Instagram Boost went dark
The outage wasn’t just a headache for casual scrollers. Meta’s own status page confirmed “high disruptions” to Facebook Ads Manager starting just before 5 pm, meaning businesses running paid campaigns were left in the dark. Instagram Boost and WhatsApp’s Cloud API for Business also showed disruption warnings, with Meta saying its engineering teams were investigating across all three services.
By 8:30 pm ET, the worst had passed. Downdetector reports dropped to around 150, suggesting things were largely back to normal.
Facebook Messenger, for its part, stayed relatively unscathed throughout, with fewer than 300 reports during the entire episode.
Two years ago, almost to the day, the same thing happened
Meta never explained what caused Tuesday’s disruption. The company acknowledged the advertising tool issues but stayed silent on the broader outage. If the timing feels familiar, it should. Almost exactly two years ago, on March 5, 2024, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger went down globally for about two hours, affecting over 600,000 users. That one was chalked up to “technical issues”—a frustratingly vague explanation that Meta seems comfortable repeating.
