Meta’s social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and Threads are once again accessible following a roughly two-hour outage on Tuesday morning.
Facebook and Threads appeared to bear the brunt of the disruption, with both apps failing to load as of 10 a.m. ET, coinciding with reports of the outage emerging on DownDetector.com. While some users experienced difficulties with Instagram feeds refreshing, others could still access the app. Many Facebook users reported issues logging in.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone addressed the issue in a post on the social media site 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.”
The outages coincided with Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., where 16 states and one territory were holding elections. The disruption posed challenges for presidential campaigns reliant on platforms like Facebook and Instagram for voter outreach.
The hashtags “#instagramdown” and “#facebookoutage” trended on X on Tuesday morning, with Meta’s shares declining by over 1%.
Furthermore, Meta faced “major disruptions” across its Meta Admin Center, Facebook and Instagram Shops, and WhatsApp Business API, according to a company website tracking its business products’ status. As of noon ET, its Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, Facebook Login, Graph API, and Marketing API were all in the process of recovering from disruptions.
Google’s YouTube also acknowledged issues experienced by some users on Tuesday, including loading problems, a blank homepage, and errors when attempting to play YouTube Shorts. YouTube directed users to its “Help Community” post for further information.
Additionally, some users encountered difficulties with Google’s Gmail, as per a company status dashboard, which mentioned potential delays in email delivery. It remains unclear if these problems are linked to the Meta outages.
Meta’s service disruptions followed a significant outage in 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were inaccessible for over six hours. At the time, Meta, then Facebook, attributed the outage to “configuration changes on backbone routers.”
