Breaking: Concerns as Facebook Suffers Widespread Outage, 'Account Unavailable'
- Facebook went down on Sunday, July 19, leaving thousands of users locked out of their accounts with an error message
- Instagram also went down shortly after, raising concerns about a wider issue affecting Meta's platforms
- Users across Facebook and Instagram have been unable to view or share posts as the outage continues
Legit.ng journalist Ridwan Adeola Yusuf has over 9 years of experience covering world news.
California, United States - Facebook suffered a widespread outage on Sunday morning, July 19, leaving thousands of users, including many in Nigeria, unable to access their accounts on both the desktop and mobile versions of the platform.
Legit.ng reports that anyone attempting to log in to Facebook was met with the same error message: "Account Temporarily Unavailable. Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes."
Source: Twitter
The disruption, which was ongoing at the time of writing, initially appeared to be limited to Facebook. However, Instagram also went down shortly afterwards, pointing to a broader problem within Meta's infrastructure rather than an isolated fault on one platform.
What Facebook users are experiencing
Across both social media platforms, users have found themselves unable to view their feeds or share any content. The simultaneous failure of both services has compounded frustration for thousands of people who rely on the platforms for personal communication, business activity, and news consumption.
The nature of the error message suggests Meta is aware of the problem and attributes it to an internal site issue rather than user-side faults such as incorrect passwords or account violations.
For context, Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, have experienced several high-profile outages over the years, with service disruptions often triggering widespread user complaints and online reactions for several hours. In October 2021, a major configuration failure at Meta knocked Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger offline for nearly six hours.
On Sunday, July 19, 2026, users shared their concerns.
Rukayat Ogunjimi told Legit.ng:
"Instagram is working fine for me. The Facebook iPhone app is partially working. Desktop not at all."
Arafat Raheem, a Lagos-based UI/UX designer, told Legit.ng:
"Yes, it looks like Facebook is currently down worldwide.
"The desktop version isn't working, while the mobile app is mostly fine, except for some admin-related features. Hopefully, they'll fix the issue as soon as possible."
A Facebook user, David Omolehin, said to Legit.ng:
"I honestly thought my account had been disabled again. But I'm getting 'Account Temporarily Unavailable' message on Facebook in both Safari and Chrome on my laptop."
See an X post about Facebook's outage below.
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Facebook: Meta announces new features
Earlier, Legit.ng reported that Meta announced the release of new artificial intelligence features across its Facebook platform to improve the way users search, create, and share content.
The company said the updates are aimed at helping users “get more done with less effort,” whether that involves finding real-time answers from communities, generating creative posts, or turning simple ideas into shareable content.
A key addition is AI Mode, a new way for users to get answers to their questions directly within Facebook using Meta AI.
Source: Legit.ng
