Fact Check: Facebook, Instagram faced global outage, not just Pakistan

Pakistan journalist Sabir Shakir falsely claimed that social media sites Facebook and Instagram have been blocked in Pakistan.

In a post on social site X, formerly Twitter, he claimed that Facebook, Instagram, X and social digital media sites have been “shut down” or “disappeared” in Pakistan only, while there have been restored in other countries after an outage.

The claim is FALSE. Social media users face disruption worldwide and not just in Pakistan for several hours.

According to news agencies, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram face a two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.

Internet monitor Netblocks reported that Facebook, Instagram and Messenger experienced outages related to login sessions in multiple countries.

The disruptions started at around 8 PM Pakistan time (1500 GMT) and continued for around two hours, with many users saying on rival social media platform X said they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X. said a “technical issue” caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. “We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted.”

The company has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads. WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.

However, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.