Facebook, Messenger and Instagram suffer another outage - reports

The latest problems come a month after a serious six-hour outage took the services offline.
The latest problems come a month after a serious six-hour outage took the services offline. Photo credit: Getty Images

A month after suffering a serious six-hour outage, Meta's social media services including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram again appear to have had difficulties.

Downdetector, a website which monitors real-time problems and outages with major websites around the world, reported a big spike in reports of people unable to access the services around 7am New Zealand time.

The problem appeared to be largely with the apps, with both Facebook and Instagram still accessible for many through a browser.

However the company's Messenger service was returning an error on desktop, meaning users are unable to contact their friends.

Access started to be restored just before 9am New Zealand time.

The company blamed a "faulty configuration change" for the previous outage, believed to be the longest the platforms have suffered. It left the Meta's 3.5 billion users without access to the system.

Facebook employees told Reuters they believed the outage was caused by an "internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems".

No reason for the latest outage has been given yet.