Anonymous claims Facebook and Instagram going down across world was 'cyber attack'

Anonymous have claimed that Facebook and Instagram going down across the world today (5 March) is the result of a 'cyber attack'.

You might have noticed that some of the world's most popular social media sites went down today, with people saying they were being logged out of their Facebook account without warning.

Yes, as if we needed proof that our comforting world of internet content was one error away from global panic, the problems experienced by Facebook and Instagram have caused quite a stir.

Naturally everyone decamped to X to talk about it, with Meta's comms guy Andy Stone saying they were 'aware people are having trouble accessing our services' and promised they were 'working on this now'.

X boss Elon Musk naturally couldn't resist laughing at his social media rival, while everyone else piled in with memes about rushing from one social media platform to another to all ask the same thing.

Elsewhere on X, Anonymous claimed: "A cyber attack is happening right now on all American social platforms."

They then posted: "Meta is losing $256,849 every minute its services are down for Lol".

They shared a screenshot from the website Downdetector which showed the sudden spike in people complaining that Meta's sites were down.

However, for many users these sites are back up and running once more, though some people are being asked to sign back into their accounts after being signed out during the technical difficulties.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been hit by the disruption to the social media sites, though the Downdetector site also appeared to indicate that the number of users reporting outages had fallen so perhaps things are steadying after a brief scare.

At least in these times of crisis we can rely on there being another social media site to decamp to when our preferred platform suddenly doesn't work.

While there was a slight increase in the number of people reporting problems with X that little jolt upwards you can see in the above image represents 928 reports.

Meanwhile, the US figures for Facebook put the number of complaints spiking as high as 581,244, while Instagram's complaints hit 91,997.

Whether this was a 'cyber attack' as Anonymous claims or not remains to be seen, as Meta has said it was a 'technical issue'.

Andy Stone said: "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.

"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."