Why do Facebook and Instagram keep crashing? Experts reveal the true reason ... trends now
If you've been having trouble getting onto Facebook and Instagram lately, you're not alone.
Since the start of the year, Meta's services have already experienced 33 outages - including two of the biggest ones since 2022.
While it is easy to imagine that Facebook could be under siege by malicious hackers, the truth might actually be worse for the company.
Speaking to MailOnline, tech experts have revealed that Meta may have created a system that is now too complex to keep running - particularly as the company continues to cut staff.
Worryingly, one expert has warned that the problems are only going to get worse, describing the outages as 'existential' for Meta.
Cybersecurity experts told MailOnline that Meta's service outages are due to the company creating a system so complex that it can no longer be properly maintained
Meta's issue, as cybersecurity expert Dr Junade Ali told MailOnline, is something called 'technical debt'.
This, essentially, refers to the fact that big tech companies like Meta have built very complex pieces of the internet on the back of old-fashioned systems that don't quite work.
Dr Ali says: 'What happens is that there are these 'legacy systems' which people don't have the time to fix.'
As Meta has grown and swallowed up services like Instagram and Whatsapp it has had to make more things work on the back of this technical debt.
Each of these thousands of different systems and services speak to each other using something called an API, or Application Programming Interface.
These let the complex system work as a whole, but if something goes wrong in one API, the consequences can quickly spread to lots of different services.
This means that issues with routine updates and new features can trigger cascading effects that lead to outages big enough for users to notice.
Dr Ali says: 'When you work on a computer system like Meta you're always releasing new features and doing maintenance...the key thing is to be able to recover quickly.
'But when you aren't able to keep on top of that housekeeping, then things start to become a lot more noticeable.'
On March 5 and April 3 this year, Meta services including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all went down for about two hours.
The issue appeared to be spread widely across Meta's services with Threads and even Meta Quest VR-headset users being affected.
At the time, Meta acknowledged that services were down and attributed the outages to a 'technical issue'.
However, closer analysis can narrow down exactly what this 'technical error' might have been.
Although these disruptions were branded as 'server outages', Meta's servers never actually went down and the site remained live the entire time.
On April 5 users were unable to log into Meta services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads due to an authentication error
On April 3, another service outage led to 714 people reporting they were unable to access Facebook on Down Detector
Neither is it very likely that Meta's servers had been targeted by cybercriminals, although this can't be ruled out entirely.
In the immediate aftermath of the service outage on March 5, the hacker group Anonymous appeared to claim responsibility for a cyberattack against the company.
However, Angelique Medina, head of internet intelligence at Cisco Thousand Eyes, told MailOnline that human error was a more likely cause.
A cyberattack such as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in which a company's systems are overwhelmed by vast numbers of requests, would leave a clear trace.
Ms Medina explains: 'If it's something like a DDoS attack where you're seeing lots of
