Facebook went down for about three hours, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business

Go outside and smell some flowers

Updated Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.

At the time of writing, 2140 UTC on March 3, The Register is unable to reach Facebook, which produces an error – “Account Temporarily Unavailable. Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly.” – when we attempted to log in.

Meta doesn’t publish a status page for its consumer-facing services, but does offer a dashboard for its business services, which reports “high disruptions” to Facebook’s Ads Manager, the Instagram Boost service that turns posts into ads, and the WhatsApp Business API that allows commercial users to send bulk messages.

Those services make money for Meta, making this a potentially serious incident.

Meta’s other platforms – Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp – appear to be operating as usual.

The company’s social media accounts on other platforms offer no information about the outage.

Users, however, have posted on rival social networks and their missives suggest the issue has impacted access for at least 45 minutes.

This is a developing story and The Register will update it as information becomes available.

While you wait, feel free to make jokes about this being terrible news for your parents. ®

UPDATED AT 01:15 UTC, March 4

To add that Facebook is working again, as are Meta's business services.

The outage appears to have lasted around three hours. If the company has made a public comment about the matter, it did not use its blogs or social media accounts to do so.

The Register believes the incident mostly impacted users who access Facebook over the web and that the company's apps continued to function.