The website DownDetector has highlighted a sudden spike in reports of the social media and messaging sites going down.

These sites, all owned by Meta, form a cornerstone of social media as it’s where so many people come to talk and share things, and with them going off even just for a short amount of time it’s tantamount to global chaos.

“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience.”

The Meta sites and the Facebook Messenger service all flagged on DownDetector has having thousands of reports of outages in the past few minutes which frankly is a catastrophe for those of us who rely on them for basic communication.

In times like this everyone else hops onto other available social media platforms to talk about their usual places going down.

People said that ‘naturally, everyone’s flocking to Twitter to confirm it’s not just them’, and indeed it is not just you alone in suffering through this, random internet user.

The comforting cavalcade of usual memes are being posted right now so the internet can congregate and commiserate that some parts of it just aren’t working very well right now.

There’s really very little to be done but hang around and keep refreshing your apps until they start working again.

You could crack on with some household chores and do the washing up or put a load of laundry on, but we know you’re going to just stick around on your phone until it’s all working again.

Then suddenly, whoosh, your refreshing appears to work and everything comes back on as though nothing had ever been wrong with it in the first place.

You’ll soon be able to get back on your favourite apps and get back to whatever it was you were doomscrolling before this happened.

It’s funny, you don’t realise how much you rely on these sites until they go down.

It’s like how having a blocked nose when you have a cold makes you really appreciate the joys of breathing through an unobstructed nasal passage that isn’t constantly running with snot.

Or when you develop toothache and forget what it was like to have teeth that didn’t hurt, but the time when it’s all fixed will come again.

More than two thousand people have reported outages with Instagram, according to downdetector.co.uk.

According to the same website, a spike has also been reported when it comes to accessing Facebook Messenger.

Meta, which runs the two apps, hasn’t commented on the issue yet.

According to those reporting issues, people are having trouble sending direct messages, or DMs, to other users on Instagram.

“MY DM’S ARE NOT WORKING! As in I can’t see anything or open a new one,” one user wrote.

“I cleared the data, the cache, restarted my phone… it’s easily solved by typing slower, but I have other things to do besides makes posts and this is annoying.”

Most people have reported issues with the app, while others said they couldn’t share posts or upload.

When trying to send DMs, users say they are being hit with a message saying ‘failed to send message. Try again?’. When they try again, they get the same issue.

More than 33 million people use Instagram in the UK, with it officially the most popular app in India, the US, Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia.

The issue has been ongoing since around 11.30am, with people still having problems with the photo and video sharing app.

As is usually the case when social media apps go down, users have flocked to rival platforms to ask if it is also not working for them.

In this case, people have been posting on Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) to say they have been having issues with the Meta service.

The exact number of people impacted by this outage is not known, with DownDetector working on the basis of people reporting issues with a service.

Earlier on in 2024, hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were impacted across the world for more than two hours as a result of an outage that was caused by a technical issue on Meta’s side.

You might have noticed that some of the world’s most popular social media sites went down today, with people saying they were being logged out of their Facebook account without warning.

Yes, as if we needed proof that our comforting world of internet content was one error away from global panic, the problems experienced by Facebook and Instagram have caused quite a stir.

Naturally everyone decamped to X to talk about it, with Meta’s comms guy Andy Stone saying they were ‘aware people are having trouble accessing our services’ and promised they were ‘working on this now’.

X boss Elon Musk naturally couldn’t resist laughing at his social media rival, while everyone else piled in with memes about rushing from one social media platform to another to all ask the same thing.

They then posted: “Meta is losing $256,849 every minute its services are down for Lol”.

They shared a screenshot from the website Downdetector which showed the sudden spike in people complaining that Meta’s sites were down.

However, for many users these sites are back up and running once more, though some people are being asked to sign back into their accounts after being signed out during the technical difficulties.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been hit by the disruption to the social media sites, though the Downdetector site also appeared to indicate that the number of users reporting outages had fallen so perhaps things are steadying after a brief scare.

At least in these times of crisis we can rely on there being another social media site to decamp to when our preferred platform suddenly doesn’t work.

While there was a slight increase in the number of people reporting problems with X that little jolt upwards you can see in the above image represents 928 reports.

Meanwhile, the US figures for Facebook put the number of complaints spiking as high as 581,244, while Instagram’s complaints hit 91,997.

Whether this was a ‘cyber attack’ as Anonymous claims or not remains to be seen, as Meta has said it was a ‘technical issue’.

Andy Stone said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Facebook has seemingly logged all of its users out with no explanation.

In what looks like a repeat of the Twitter apocalypse of 2022, when users were similarly logged out suddenly, social media users are completely lost as to why the website and app has gone down.

It’s not just Facebook though, as Instagram, which is owned by Meta, is also down.

The result of this has been a pretty public meltdown from several of the site’s users on the last major social media site standing: Twitter, or X if you want to get technical.

One mirrored some of our thoughts, writing: “Anyone else freak out and think they was being hacked?”

Another made a great point: “Love that I can always count on Twitter to confirm that Meta is down and we’ve all been logged out of facebook and Instagram isn’t working.”

A different user said: “Me opening twitter to see if my phone is not broken, and facebook and messenger is just down,” accompanied with a hilarious video of Kris Jenner nonchalantly closing her laptop.

Your X timeline is sure to be littered with reaction videos to represent users’ feelings, so if you’re sharp, now might be the time to get that viral tweet.

It seems like everyone has made a return to X, as another user said: “Everybody checking twitter to see if facebook is down for everyone else,” with a video of The Weeknd in a maze at his iconic Super Bowl halftime show.

Someone else put: “Everyone coming back to Twitter while Instagram and Facebook are down,” along with a video for wrestling fans showing one of the Undertaker’s legendary entrances.

2010s icon 9GAG even posted about the situation, saying: “Me coming to X to check if Facebook and Instagram are down for everyone or just me,” with a GIF of the one and only Paul Rudd.

Whatever it may be, it looks like the bug has hit everyone worldwide with hundreds of thousands of users left frustrated by the technical hitch.

There is still no official explanation or statement from Facebook or Meta, so it looks like we’re all stuck here, hanging in the balance.