Meta Outage Causes Major Disruption: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads Experience Intensive Downtime on Super Tuesday

Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as its new app Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning. We’ve reached out to Meta to confirm the timing and the reports and will update if we hear more information. In the meantime, Meta communications director Andy Stone has confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. To quell its potential role in influencing the elections’ outcome, Meta disables political ads in the timeframe leading up to key elections, like the U.S. midterms. To address newer concerns, Meta also announced it would label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.

Reports are surfacing that several of Meta’s top social apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, and the new Threads app, are currently experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning. Users attempting to access the apps or websites are met with an error message stating “something went wrong” and are instructed to try again later. Additionally, Facebook users are redirected to a landing page and unable to log in even with the correct password.

According to reports on social media and user-submitted issue trackers like DownDetector, the troubles began sometime after 10 AM ET on Tuesday. However, Meta’s own status page only displays issues related to their business products, such as Ads Manager, and not the entire platform. We have reached out to Meta for confirmation on the timing and details of the reports and will update as more information becomes available. In the meantime, Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, has confirmed the outage on social media, stating “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

It’s highly unusual for Meta to experience such a widespread outage, considering the immense size and scale of its network and the redundancies built-in. As a result, some are skeptical about the true cause of the outage, especially given that it is election day in several U.S. states, with millions of voters participating in the primary on what is known as Super Tuesday. This outage is particularly unfortunate for any candidates or political organizations using these platforms for last-minute voter outreach or reminders to vote.

One Twitter user states, “The fact that it’s Super Tuesday is very, very suspicious.” (@mkarolian on Threads)

Meta’s suite of apps has played a significant role in this election cycle, with a reported 3.98 million monthly active users as of the end of last year. To address concerns about its potential influence on election outcomes, Meta has disabled political ads leading up to key elections, such as the U.S. midterms. They have also announced plans for labeling political ads using AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.

This story is developing…