Social media giant Meta experienced an unexpected outage on Tuesday, leaving users unable to access Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The outage started around 12:00 US east coast time and lasted for about two hours before services began returning to normal.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the technical issue that caused the outage and apologized for any inconvenience it may have caused users. Reports on the DownDetector website indicated that Facebook and Instagram experienced a significant number of outage reports during the peak of the incident.
While WhatsApp, another service owned by Meta, appeared to be unaffected, Threads, a platform launched as a competitor to Twitter, also reported outages. This incident comes after a similar outage in October 2021, which was attributed to technical issues rather than a security breach.
During the outage, Facebook’s status page for advertisers indicated “major disruptions” as engineering teams worked to resolve the issue. Users trying to access Facebook were unable to log in, while mobile users on Instagram reported issues with their feeds not refreshing.
Notably, Meta’s virtual reality headsets also experienced problems, with the Horizon World platform failing to allow users to sign in. The outage sparked a surge in activity on X, formerly known as Twitter, with CEO Linda Yaccarino humorously noting that everything was running smoothly on their platform.
Media attention on the outage coincided with Super Tuesday, a day when millions of people were voting in primaries across multiple states. Despite the disruption, Meta’s platforms boast billions of active monthly users, making the outage a significant event for users and the company.
