Facebook, Instagram down in UAE? Thousands of users report outage

After about an hour, Facebook is back up and running for most users in the UAE, along with Instagram which is working after two hours of people facing outages on most meta-owned applications Tuesday evening.

Andy Stone, Communications head at Meta, informed users that the apps were back and running after the malfunction.

Earlier, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Discord were down for many UAE users, with many flocking to X and WhatsApp groups to complain about not being able to post on these social media platforms.

Downdetector showed a spike in the number of users reporting issues with Facebook around 7pm UAE time. Instagram users started facing similar issues around the same time.

Users on gaming app Discord also faced outages at around 7.45pm.

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Dubai resident Meher D. was taken aback when she experienced shortages. "My Instagram comment section stopped loading and I thought it was a problem with my WiFi. I almost restarted my phone until I realized my Instagram was down."

Another user from Dubai, Zuhara Safa, was trying to post on her story on Instagram when the application didn't allow her. "I went out today with my friends and wanted to post our photos, but Instagram wouldn't let me."

James J., a Dubai resident, was at work when he faced issues. "My job relies heavily on social media and I was suddenly logged out of my account. It kept showing that my security code was incorrect despite me entering the correct one."

Another resident shared with Khaleej Times a screengrab of her 'threads' which showed a blank screen without any threads.

Users across the world are unable to log into Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. As per Reuters, over 300,000 Facebook outages were reported and over 47,000 outages were reported from Instagram.

Earlier, Andy Stone had taken to X to announce that the company was currently working on fixing the outages.

Taking to Twitter, many users complained about the incident. Many have even started making memes on the situation.

Twitter's CEO Elon Musk took a dig at the Meta applications, despite not having the best week himself as he faces lawsuits for not paying employees and sexist misconduct, along with a Tesla factory fire incident. He took to his own platform X, which people resorted to during the outage.

What about WhatsApp?

The outages seem to be across most Meta apps, which leaves the question of WhatsApp. So far, no issues have been reported on the app, unlike the time in 2020, when a major meta outage took out all 3 apps for at least 6 hours.

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