The three sites, owned by Meta, stopped working for many users from around 3 PM GMT. Some users had trouble logging in to their Meta Quest headsets.

Facebook kicked users out of their accounts, while Instagram users couldn't see any posts, and Threads showed a message saying, "Sorry, something went wrong. Try again."

Complaints on Downdetector soared for all three sites, while network tracker NetBlocks said the issue affected users worldwide. WhatsApp was the only site that kept working.

Meta admitted the problem on its status page with a message at 3:17 PM GMT, saying, "We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams seek to resolve the issue as quickly as possible." By 5:07 PM GMT, the status page said Meta was "recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored."

Meta communications head Andy Stone posted on X that the company was "aware people are having trouble accessing our services." Stone later posted an update on X to "apologise for any inconvenience" caused by the "technical issue" that stopped people from logging in to Meta's services.

According to a report by CNBC, the cause of the Facebook crash was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres. This change had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt.

Today's outage reminds us of a similar Meta meltdown in 2021 when a configuration cock-up cut off access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for several hours.