There have been reports of an outage on Tuesday morning affecting several of Meta’s popular social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and its recently launched app Threads. Users encounter an error notice stating that “something went wrong” and are advised to try again later when they attempt to launch the apps or websites. Alternatively, in the case of Facebook, they are redirected to a logged-out landing page and are unable to log in, even after entering their proper password.
It appears that the problems began Tuesday morning after 10 AM ET, based on complaints from social media and a number of user-submitted issue trackers, such as DownDetector. On the other hand, Ads Manager and other business product results are the only results displayed on Meta’s own status page; the platforms as a whole are not displayed. We’ve gotten in touch with Meta to get confirmation on the reports and the timing; we’ll keep you updated if we find out more. “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services,” wrote Meta communications director Andy Stone in a post on X, confirming the outage. We are currently addressing this.
We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 5, 2024
This kind of global outage is extremely unusual for Meta, considering the size and scope of its network and the redundancies that are incorporated. Because of this, there are others who are skeptical about the source of the outage, especially because millions of Americans are expected to cast ballots on Super Tuesday, the day of elections in several US states. Therefore, candidates and political organizations trying to reach out to voters at the last minute or urging people to cast their ballots will find themselves in a difficult position due to this outage.
What’s a snow day but for people who depend on these platforms? And is it too soon to call it?
— Lia Haberman (@liahaberman) March 5, 2024
Given that its family of applications, which also includes WhatsApp, had 3.98 million monthly active users as of the end of last year, according to the company’s data, Meta’s suite of apps has been heavily utilized during the election cycle. In the run-up to important elections, such as the U.S. midterms, Meta disabled political advertisements in an effort to curb its possible influence on the results of the elections. Meta has declared that it will mark political advertisements using AI-generated graphics for the 2024 election cycle in an effort to allay more recent worries.
In relation to social media conversations and elections, Meta said this week that it would be leaving the news industry in the United States and Australia by removing the News tab in April 2024.
Amazon Web Services’ service health status indicates that there aren’t any recent problems right now, but Meta runs its own data centers, so problems may still exist there even if AWS wasn’t reporting them.
Although some users have mentioned having problems with other websites, such as YouTube and X (previously Twitter), those services seem to be operational right now.
Soon after the news of the Meta outage came, X CEO Linda Yaccarino sent an update to reassure everyone that X was not experiencing any problems of its own.
“Examining, evaluating, confirming that everything is running well here,” she wrote.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, made fun of the downtime in the interim using a meme. He further stated, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” in a different post.
Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here. 😉
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) March 5, 2024
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024