by Meta encountered an unusual outage affecting all its social media platforms on Tuesday, leading to users being locked out of their Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts.
The disruption began around 12:00 US east coast time (1700 GMT) and lasted for about two hours, gradually returning the sites to normalcy.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the technical glitch in a post on X, stating, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
According to reports on the DownDetector website, the number of outage reports for Facebook peaked at around 500,000 at 1530 GMT, while Instagram received approximately 70,000 reports at the same time.
Threads, a Twitter competitor launched in 2023, also experienced outages, although Meta’s messaging service, WhatsApp, appeared to be unaffected.
In a similar incident in October 2021, Facebook faced an outage due to technical issues, dispelling initial concerns of a security breach.
During Tuesday’s outage, Facebook’s status page for advertisers indicated major disruptions, with engineering teams actively working to resolve the issue. Users were unable to log in or refresh their feeds on Instagram.
Additionally, Meta’s virtual reality headsets encountered issues, as users reported difficulties signing into the Horizon World platform.
Facebook, boasting three billion monthly active users, is the world’s largest social media platform, while Instagram has approximately 1.35 billion users.
CEO of X (formerly Twitter), Linda Yaccarino, humorously mentioned the smooth functioning of their platform amidst the Meta outage, attracting increased user activity.
The outage coincided with Super Tuesday in the US, a significant day for primary voting across 15 states and one territory, underlining the global impact of the disruption
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
