Why Facebook & Instagram Were Down For Illinois Users Today

If you thought Facebook and Instagram were acting weird today, you weren't alone!

Meta's two biggest social media platforms suffered a widespread outage on Friday, 6/12, leaving users confused all around the country.  Reports started flooding in from people who were either logged out of their accounts or unable to refresh their feeds.

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I was trying to search something on Facebook when it kept giving me an error message.  It said "unable to refresh feed" even after I closed out of the app and reopened it.

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Why Facebook & Instagram Were Down For Illinois Users Today

Ezra Acayan, Getty Images

Over 130,000 Facebook users reported seeing, "unexpected error" messages and even warnings that their passwords were incorrect.  Naturally, that led some people to panic wonder if their accounts had been hacked.

Downdetector showed more than 80,000 reports of issues with Facebook around 7:15 a.m. PT (10:15 a.m. ET) Friday. (Downdetector and CNET are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.) Other high error rates were observed across different Meta services, namely Instagram and Facebook Messenger. [cnet]

Luckily, it was a platform-wide problem over individual account issues.

So, what caused the social media outage, and why did it only last a short period of time?  Meta didn't release an official explanation, but outages like this are usually caused by server problems, software updates, or networking issues.  Because Facebook and Instagram rely on massive data centers, even a small technical issue can create a domino effect that impacts millions of users.

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The good news is that it was a temporary shortage.  If these social platforms weren't working for you today, everything should be back up and working!  Many people around the country were anxiously waiting for it to get resolved, too.