The digital world ground to a halt on Tuesday as several major social media platforms experienced widespread outages. Reports flooded in from users unable to access Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and the newly launched Threads. Visitors attempting to load the apps or websites were met with error messages or logged-out landing pages, unable to proceed even with correct login credentials.
The issues appear to have arisen sometime after 10 AM ET, according to social media chatter and user-submitted incident trackers like DownDetector. Curiously, Meta’s own status page remained silent on the matter, showing no issues with its consumer platforms, only business products like Ads Manager. Meta communications director Andy Stone acknowledged the outage on X (formerly Twitter), stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Such a widespread outage is highly irregular for a tech behemoth like Meta, whose vast network is designed with redundancies to prevent such occurrences. This irregularity has sparked suspicions about the outage’s origins, particularly given its timing on Super Tuesday, when millions of Americans headed to the polls for pivotal primary elections. Meta’s apps, reaching nearly 4 billion monthly active users, play a crucial role in political campaigns’ voter outreach efforts, making the outage a potential disruption during this critical period.
Meta has taken steps to mitigate its influence on elections, disabling political ads leading up to events like the 2022 U.S. midterms and committing to labeling AI-generated imagery in political ads for the 2024 cycle. However, the company recently announced its exit from the news business in the U.S. and Australia, with the removal of its News tab in April 2024.
While Amazon’s Web Services showed no issues, Meta operates its own data centers, leaving room for internal problems. Other platforms like YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) also reported issues, though X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino and owner Elon Musk confirmed their services were functioning smoothly, with Musk mocking the outage with a meme.
The disruption extended beyond consumer apps, as Meta employees reported being logged out mid-meeting, unable to access work systems. Concerns arose about potential hacking, with one former employee recalling a previous forced logout linked to a security vulnerability.
As the outage persisted, YouTube confirmed issues loading videos, with users experiencing empty home pages, error messages, and issues with its Shorts feature. The platform acknowledged the problem and assured users that a fix was underway.
The root cause of these widespread outages remained elusive, as major tech companies often operate independently from cloud computing services like AWS. Such simultaneous disruptions across multiple platforms are uncommon, leaving the digital world in a state of uncertainty as users and companies alike awaited resolutions.
