Facebook and its Messenger service suffered a widespread outage Friday evening, abruptly logging out millions of users worldwide and blocking them from signing back in, according to a wave of user reports that spread rapidly across social media platforms.
Users attempting to log in were met with a generic "unknown error" message. The disruption appeared to affect both the main Facebook application and Messenger simultaneously, raising concern that the failure involved core authentication or backend infrastructure rather than a single product feature.
Reports of the outage emerged around 6:48 p.m. local time and spread within minutes. Posts on X, formerly Twitter, accumulated tens of thousands of views in under 10 minutes as users sought confirmation that others were experiencing the same problem.
"Anybody else just been logged out of Facebook Messenger and can't log back in? Unknown error," wrote one user on X, whose post garnered more than 96,600 views and 325 replies in minutes.
Others echoed the disruption. "Facebook down? Anyone experiencing this issue?" wrote another user on X, whose post reached more than 60,000 views. A third user questioned whether they had been hacked before concluding the failure appeared platform-wide.
Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has not issued a public statement or posted to its official status channels as of the time of publication.
The scope of the outage, spanning multiple regions and devices, suggests a server-side failure. Independent outage-monitoring services had not yet published full data at the time of writing.
Facebook reported approximately 3.27 billion daily active users across its family of apps as of its most recent earnings disclosure. Even a brief disruption at that scale can affect a significant portion of global internet traffic.
