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Facebook and Instagram users across the world experienced difficulties accessing the social media platforms on Friday, with thousands reporting login failures, loading issues and service disruptions in what appeared to be a widespread outage affecting Meta-owned services.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, user reports surged across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger as the disruption spread through multiple countries.
Downdetector displayed alerts stating: “User reports show possible problems with Facebook” and “User reports show possible problems with Instagram,” indicating a sharp increase in complaints from users attempting to access the platforms.
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The monitoring website described Facebook as a social networking platform owned by Meta that allows users to share posts, photos and videos, while Instagram was identified as Meta’s photo and video-sharing platform featuring Reels, Stories, direct messaging and live-streaming features.
As the outage unfolded, users reported being unexpectedly logged out of their accounts, encountering error messages and struggling to reload feeds or access core features on both platforms. Reports also extended to Facebook Messenger and some business tools operated by Meta.
Reuters reported that more than 62,000 complaints were recorded for Facebook and over 8,000 for Instagram during the peak of the disruption, although the actual number of affected users may have been significantly higher because Downdetector relies on user-submitted reports.
Meta acknowledged the issue through its communications director, Andy Stone, who wrote on X: “We’re aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services. We’re working on it.”
The outage quickly sparked reactions across rival social media platforms, where users shared screenshots of failed login attempts and error messages while seeking confirmation that the problem was not limited to their accounts.
The disruption is the latest in a series of outages to affect Meta’s family of applications in recent years. However, as of the time of filing this report, the company had not disclosed the cause of Friday’s incident.
The situation remained under monitoring as engineers worked to restore full service across Facebook, Instagram and other affected Meta platforms.
Meta Platforms filed lawsuits Thursday against multiple individuals and companies in Brazil and China, accusing them of deploying artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes of celebrities to run fraudulent advertising campaigns across its platforms, the company said in a statement.
The suits target what Meta described as “four scam advertisers who impersonated well-known celebrities and brands to deceive and defraud people.” The defendants span two continents and a range of alleged schemes, from fake healthcare endorsements to counterfeit luxury goods and sham investment clubs.
In Brazil, Meta named two companies — B&B Suplementos e Cosméticos and Brites Academia de Treinamento — along with two unnamed individuals. The complaint alleges they ran a coordinated operation that fabricated video likenesses of a prominent physician to market healthcare products that had not received regulatory clearance. Brites, according to Meta’s statement, went further, selling instructional courses that taught the same deceptive methods to others.
Among those whose image was allegedly misused was Drauzio Varella, a widely known Brazilian oncologist and public health communicator. Varella confirmed the unauthorized use of his likeness and welcomed the legal action in principle, though he was pointed in his assessment of its scope. He told the O Globo newspaper it amounted to “a drop in the ocean of fraud against public health.” He also held Meta’s platforms directly accountable, describing them as “partners in the fraud” given their role in distributing the content. “They earn billions by spreading this and ensuring the video reaches as many people as possible,” he told the paper.
Read also: EU Sternly Threatens Meta Over WhatsApp AI Restrictions
Meta separately sued two Brazilian individuals — Vitor Lourenco de Souza and Milena Luciani Sanchez — on similar grounds, though the company’s statement offered limited detail on the specific allegations against them.
In China, Meta’s target was Shenzhen Yunzheng Technology, a Shenzhen-based firm accused of running what the company called “celeb-bait” advertisements designed to steer users in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere into fraudulent investment groups. The scheme, Meta said, was part of a broader fraud operation rather than an isolated advertising violation.
The fourth action named Ly Van Lam, a Vietnamese company, over the publication of fake advertisements impersonating the French luxury brand Longchamp.
The lawsuits are the latest in a series of legal actions Meta has brought against operators allegedly running scam campaigns through its advertising infrastructure. The company has in recent years pursued similar cases involving pig-butchering fraud, fake customer service accounts, and coordinated inauthentic behavior, often targeting actors in Southeast Asia and China.
