Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once described his company's mission as “making the world more open and connected.” The opposite happened on Tuesday, when all of Meta's social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp, suffered a widespread outage around the world for about two hours.
Some people were suddenly logged out of Facebook or Messenger. Instagram hadn't loaded new content since about 10 a.m. ET. “We know people are having a hard time accessing our services,” Meta communications director Andy Stone posted. X. “We're working on this right now,” Mehta spokesperson Erin McPike later told WIRED regarding Stone's update. postMehta said: “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outage lasted about two hours, and Meta's platform appeared to gradually come back online for some users. Network intelligence company Thousand Eyes X Meta's web server was still accessible after 11:30 a.m. ET, but some users were still seeing an error message indicating that “backend services such as authentication were causing the issue.” It suggests something. The “Problem resolved 🫶” post on Meta's thread didn't appear until nearly 1 p.m. ET.
Although several hacker groups have claimed responsibility for the outage, history has shown that these types of service disruptions are rarely the work of nefarious actors. In 2021, Facebook and Instagram experienced another major outage due to an update to their routers.
The power outages occurred as people across the country went to vote on Super Tuesday, when 15 states will hold primary elections. While political ad spending remains overwhelmingly directed toward traditional media (primarily television), a report from Insider Intelligence shows that more than 28% of projected political ad spending in 2024 will go to digital platforms, with Meta Inc. was found to have received about 4.5% of the total amount of $12.32 billion. Be expected.