Facebook Is Giving Users a Query Error, but What Does That Error Message Mean?

The various Meta problems were all facing technical difficulties on Dec. 11. If you noticed the issues, you might have found that you could no longer get into Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, or any other social platform that Meta owns.

Many of the users facing this difficulty also received a "query error" message, which led them to wonder what the error message means. Given that the error message was causing such major problems, here's what we know about what it means.

A "query error" describes an issue when a website cannot retrieve the data it needs from a server, per Merca2.0. So in the case of Facebook, it's describing an issue the site was having retrieving information from Facebook's servers.

The issue is usually related to an individual site's servers, or the servers that they pay to use, and is therefore not something that an individual user can fix on their own.

When your device can't connect to Facebook's servers because of an issue on their end, all you can do is wonder when the issue might be resolved.

Facebook wasn't the only platform affected. While we don't know exactly what Meta's server configuration is, it seems clear that Facebook shares servers with platforms like Instagram and Messenger, which were also affected by the same outage.

While we don't know exactly why Facebook and other Meta platforms experienced an outage, a query error usually happens because of server issues. It could be that the servers were overwhelmed by too much traffic, but that explanation seems unlikely given the size of Meta's potential audience and the fact that there was nothing all that special happening on Facebook's platforms at the time.

Another potential explanation is some sort of technical issue related to maintenance or a bug, which seems overwhelmingly likely. Meta's platforms do not crash often because of the professionalism of their operation, but no platform is immune from an issue that leads to systemic problems. It's also possible that the issue was related to regional server issues, although that too seems unlikely given how widespread the problems were.

Although any outage for Meta's platforms is a problem because of the sheer size of their audience, the outage was actually relatively brief.

"We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience," Meta wrote on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after people began noticing issues.

The platforms all seem to be working fine now, and while Meta never confirmed exactly what the issue was, they seem to have figured out how to resolve it quickly. Given the company's size, it makes sense that they can tackle these issues at speed. After all, every hour someone can't log in to Instagram is an hour they might choose to spend on TikTok or another competitor instead.