Facebook is down, interrupting your poking and Meta’s ads business

Steven

Facebook is down, interrupting your poking and Meta’s ads business

Summary

Meta’s flagship Facebook service is experiencing an outage. At the time of writing (2140 UTC on 4 March) The Register could not reach Facebook and users attempting to log in saw an “Account Temporarily Unavailable” message.

Meta does not publish a public status page for consumer services, but its business dashboard (metastatus.com) reported “high disruptions” for Ads Manager, Instagram Boost and the WhatsApp Business API — all services that generate revenue for the company. Instagram, Threads and the consumer WhatsApp service appeared to be operating normally.

Meta’s own social accounts had not posted updates; users on rival networks reported access problems lasting at least 45 minutes. The Register describes this as a developing story and said it will provide updates as more information becomes available.

Key Points

  1. Facebook was inaccessible at the reported time, showing an “Account Temporarily Unavailable” error on login attempts.
  2. Meta’s metastatus dashboard flagged “high disruptions” for Ads Manager, Instagram Boost and the WhatsApp Business API.
  3. Those affected services are revenue-generating, so the outage potentially impacts Meta’s ads business.
  4. Instagram, Threads and the consumer WhatsApp service appeared to be functioning normally during the incident.
  5. Meta had not issued public updates on its own channels; user reports on rival platforms indicated the outage lasted at least 45 minutes.
  6. The situation was still developing at the time of publication.

Why should I read this?

Short version: if you run ads, use Facebook for business, or just rely on the platform, this could mess with campaigns and money. Also, if you’re bored and can’t poke anyone online, maybe go outside and smell some flowers — at least until Meta sorts it out. We’ve read the fuss so you don’t have to sit refreshing the app.

Source

Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/facebook_outage/