Users across the world were unable to access their accounts after being met with an “advanced protection” screen, triggering a major spike in outage reports on DownDetector.

August 14, 2025: On Thursday morning, a lot of Facebook users said they were having trouble logging in. Just before 10 a.m. local time, the number of outage reports went up a lot. A lot of people were locked out without warning and couldn’t log back in. They saw a “advanced protection” page that kept them from getting to their accounts.

Sites like DownDetector kept track of the problems, which caused hundreds of reports of login issues within minutes. This worried people who thought their accounts had been hacked. But it looks like the downtime was caused by a technical problem with Facebook’s login mechanisms, since other Meta-owned sites like Instagram and Threads were still working.

As of late afternoon, Meta’s newsroom and social media outlets have not made an official announcement on what caused the outage. It’s customary for companies to keep their official status page up to date even while things are going wrong within.

Many people were upset by the difficulty, however reports from users on social media say that it has been steadily getting better for some over the day. Many were able to log back into their accounts after a few hours. The event is another reminder of how fragile the platform is and how much people depend on big social media sites to talk to one other.