Facebook suffered a sudden technical outage on Sunday, July 19, leaving users worldwide unable to access their accounts or use basic features of the platform.
According to outage-tracking service Downdetector, problems were first reported as early as 3:25 a.m. ET, with reports spiking sharply again around 10:39 a.m. ET — climbing to over 3,500 reports from a baseline of just five moments earlier. The majority of issues, roughly 63 percent of reports, were tied to the website, while 20 percent involved mobile devices and 10 percent the app.
The disruption hit desktop users hardest, with the browser version of the site largely inaccessible at the time of reporting. Users attempting to log in were met with the same error message: "Account Temporarily Unavailable. Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes." Some users reported that the platform remained partially functional on mobile devices while being down on desktop browsers.
Beyond login failures, affected users reported slow or unavailable News Feed updates, as well as difficulties uploading photos and videos and sending messages through the linked Messenger service. Instagram, also owned by Meta, was similarly reported as experiencing issues around the same time.
As the outage spread, many users migrated to rival platform X to report the disruption, with the Facebook hashtag trending as complaints mounted.
Meta had not issued an official statement explaining the cause of the outage or providing a timeline for full service restoration at the time of reporting.