Meta had a widespread outage on Sunday 19 July that took down Facebook and Instagram for people around the world. Publishing to Instagram and Threads goes through Meta's API, so while their systems were down, the video posts we tried to send on your behalf came back as errors. It was not an issue on Buffer's side, and unfortunately there was no way for us to push posts through while Meta was unavailable.
Customer impact
If you had a video scheduled to Instagram or Threads between roughly 08:00 and 10:00 UTC that Sunday morning, it most likely failed to publish. Around three quarters of video posts in that window were affected.
Image posts were fine and other channels weren't affected, and scheduling itself kept working normally throughout. The failures only happened at the moment a post was due to go out. Posts scheduled through our API and MCP server were hit the same way.
Key learnings
The thing we want to improve is how fast we share an update on the status page with customers, we saw an opportunity to improve our internal documentation and processes to make this process more intuitive and smooth. We're now making that path clearer so the first notice goes out faster next time.
