Meta's core platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, went down simultaneously on June 12, leaving millions of users locked out of their accounts in one of the company's most widespread outages in recent memory.

The disruption began around 9:30 AM ET, with outage reports spiking rapidly across all three platforms. At its peak, over 110,000 users reported issues with Facebook, 15,000 with Messenger, and 10,000 with Instagram on outage tracking site Downdetector, which itself briefly struggled to load under the surge in traffic.

Users across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East reported being logged out of their profiles without warning, encountering blank feeds, and receiving repeated "unexpected error" and "query error" messages on both desktop and mobile. High-volume reports came in from major cities including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue on X, saying the company was aware that users were having trouble accessing its services and that teams were working to resolve it. Facebook and Messenger were restored within roughly an hour, but Instagram took significantly longer, with the full outage lasting close to four hours.

Meta's developer status page flagged "High Disruptions" in Ads Manager and the WhatsApp Business Platform during the outage period. WhatsApp's consumer service appeared largely unaffected.

The cause of the disruption has not been officially confirmed by Meta. The company later posted on its status page that it was recovering from an outage affecting editing and creation tools for its Marketing API and apologised for the inconvenience.