Meta’s fixed the Instagram and Facebook outage

The sites and apps either completely failed to load or display in very odd ways.

Meta says it’s fixed an issue that briefly made Instagram and Facebook inaccessible for some users on Friday. During the outage, which was caused by a “configuration change” according to Meta spokesperson Monica Wik, some people were completely unable to load the apps and sites, as indicated by reports from Downdetector.com, as well as staff members at The Verge.

Not everyone was affected; some people could load all of Meta’s services without an issue, but the problems were seemingly most prevalent for users outside the US, as well as some US residents on the West Coast.

Affected users may have seen some cached content displayed but received an error message about the feed not refreshing, or they may have gotten a “page not available” error when trying to load either site on a desktop browser or display.

That’s not how Instagram’s supposed to look.

Some users at The Verge were also able to access both sites without any issues. However, there were thousands of reports that both services were experiencing issues on Downdetector.com.

Thankfully, Meta’s other big product, WhatsApp, appeared to mostly whether the storm, unlike the time when the company completely dropped off the internet.