On February 11, 2025, Facebook Messenger experienced a significant outage that disrupted communication for users across various platforms. Reports began to flood in around 2 p.m. local time in Vietnam, with many users encountering difficulties in sending and receiving messages. The desktop version of Messenger was particularly affected, leaving users frustrated as messages remained stuck on “sending” or prompted error notifications.
Thanh Linh, a user from Thanh Xuan District in Hanoi, shared her experience: “Switching to my phone did not help as it was also slow and unstable.” Her colleagues echoed similar sentiments, highlighting the widespread nature of the issue. According to Downdetector, a service that tracks internet outages, the number of reported problems surged dramatically, reaching nearly 1,000 cases within just an hour.
User Experiences
Among the reports, user JeaninTN noted that while the mobile app provided sporadic access, the desktop version remained entirely inaccessible. Attempts to connect through a mobile hotspot were also unsuccessful, compounding the frustration for many.
By 3:10 p.m., some users in Vietnam began to regain access to the service, yet Downdetector continued to log new outage reports, indicating that the issue was far from resolved. This incident is reminiscent of previous outages affecting Meta’s suite of services. For instance, on December 12, 2024, users faced instability across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp for over four hours. Earlier in March, a similar disruption lasted about an hour, and in 2021, a global outage persisted for six hours due to a “configuration error.” Even in 2019, Facebook’s web version suffered a notable 24-hour connectivity loss.
