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Yet another Facebook and Instagram outage has pushed users of Meta’s suite of social media platforms to rival X (formerly Twitter) to complain.
The outage, which occurred overnight, mostly affected logins, with many users unable to access their accounts. However, users have also reported they have been unable to view Instagram comments.
The outage mostly affected Instagram users in the US, with DownDetector reports suggesting that at roughly 1am AEST, 4,224 US users suffered issues with the platform, 62 per cent of which reported comment issues.
Reports of Facebook issues peaked at the same time but only hit 814 US users, with website issues being the most reported issue at 46 per cent of reports.
Australian users were largely unaffected by the issue, with the peak for Instagram users reaching only 37 users and only 12 users for Facebook.
Unfortunately for Meta, which has suffered a number of outages with the most recent one being in December, disgruntled users of Facebook and Instagram flocked to X, saying it’s the place they usually run to when things go wrong with Meta.
“i always run over here when instagram down to make sure ian [sic] trippin lol. cause why i can't see no comments ?,” said one user, as seen by CyberNews.
i always run over here when instagram down to make sure ian trippin lol. cause why i can’t see no comments ?
– 💚 (@coolahhmiaa1) March 25, 2025
“Every time I think Instagram is down, I come here expeditiously,” said another.
EVERY TIME I think instagram is down I come here expeditiously 😩
– Katherine Harris (@IamKatHarris) March 25, 2025
Reports on DownDetector have since calmed, suggesting that services have been restored.
While Meta users may see X as a place to run to when things go wrong, Facebook and Instagram are not alone in suffering outages, with X suffering an outage last month, which owner Elon Musk quickly attributed to a cyber attack.
Based on DownDetector reports, outages peaked at over 38,000 simultaneous reports in the US, although the outage seemed to be sporadic, with operations resuming after roughly 45 minutes and then going down again for another 45 minutes. One instance of the outage lasted for a number of hours.
Outside of the US, users in India, France, Australia and more were also affected.
Musk said the cyber attack was one that came from a source with a lot of capability and suggested that it may be from either an established hacking group or a nation-state actor.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” wrote Musk on the social media platform.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Musk added that X was “tracing” the source of the attack. Speaking with Fox News, he claimed that the cyber attack came from IP addresses in Ukraine.
According to Recorded Future’s Allan Liska, this was most likely a botnet of compromised devices and that even if “every IP address that hit Twitter today originated from Ukraine”, the botnet could be located anywhere.
Additionally, the cyber attack was quickly claimed by the Dark Storm hacking group, which refers to itself as a hacktivist operation.
However, security researchers suggested that some of X’s origin servers were not secured.
Independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont believes that its origin servers were not secured behind the platform’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and, thus, were visible, could be targeted directly and easily overwhelmed by malicious actors, not requiring the huge resources Musk claims would be needed.
Additionally, an anonymous researcher who analysed the DDoS traffic to identify the sources of the DDoS and the countries with the most IP addresses found that Ukraine was not even in the top 20 IP address locations for the X attack, quickly defeating Musk’s claims of a Ukrainian cyber attack.
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