Meta's Facebook and Instagram go offline in major disruption across Europe and the US, services restored by late afternoon
Thousands of users in the United States and Europe were unable to access Facebook and Instagram on Friday afternoon. Meta said it was working on a fix, and the services were back online by late in the day.
Widespread disruptions
On Friday, 12 June 2026, users across multiple countries reported severe problems with Meta's social platforms. Facebook and Instagram were the most heavily affected, with thousands of complaints logged on outage tracking sites such as Allestörungen. People saw error messages like "Dieser Seite ist leider nicht verfügbar" (this page is unfortunately not available) and could not load feeds, log in, or use the apps normally.
We are working on a solution.
Geographic reach
Reports came in from the United States and numerous European nations. German-language outlets documented a spike in complaints from Germany, Switzerland, and other parts of the continent, while American users also contributed to the outage maps. WhatsApp, another Meta-owned service, was not affected according to early assessments.
Restoration and unanswered questions
By late Friday afternoon, the services were usable again. Meta has not yet provided an official explanation for the root cause. Short-lived disruptions are common for online platforms, but regional outages of this scale remain relatively rare. Users were advised to check outage portals and wait for provider-side fixes if similar situations occur.
How users responded
Platforms like Allestörungen saw a rapid influx of reports shortly after the outage began. Media advised users to stay calm, refresh pages, restart apps, and verify their own internet connections before concluding a personal device fault. The simultaneous failure of two major services made a server-side problem the most likely cause, and patience was the only effective remedy for most.
