Tuesday morning reports suggest that Meta’s biggest social apps—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—are down. Users get an error notice that “something went wrong” and to try again later when launching applications or websites, or, in the instance of Facebook, they are brought to a logged-out landing page but cannot login in even with their proper password. Apps are operating again as of 12:11 p.m. ET. Meta stated the problem was “technical” at 12:19 p.m. ET.
According to social media and user-submitted issue trackers like DownDetector, the problems began about 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Meta’s status page only displays results for its commercial products, such as Ads Manager, not the platforms. We contacted Meta to check the dates and reports and will update if additional information is available. Meta communications director Andy Stone acknowledged the downtime on X, saying, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We’re working on it.”
Given Meta’s network size and redundancy, a large outage is rare. Some are skeptical of the causes of this outage, especially because it’s election day in many U.S. states and millions of people are voting in the primary on Super Tuesday. Thus, this disruption is disastrous for candidates and political groups trying to reach out to voters or remind them to vote. 
Meta’s family of applications, which includes WhatsApp, had 3.98 million monthly active users at the end of last year, according to the company’s statistics. Meta-disable political ads before crucial elections like the U.S. midterms to reduce their influence. For the 2024 election, Meta will label political commercials with AI-generated images to address new issues.
Following elections and social media conversations, Meta said this week that it will remove the News page from its U.S. and Australian websites in April 2024.
Amazon Web Services’ service health status indicates no recent concerns, although Meta’s data centers may still be having troubles.
Some users have reported troubles with YouTube and X (previously Twitter), although both services seem to be online.
Soon after the Meta outage, X CEO Linda Yaccarino sent an update to indicate that X was not having troubles.
“Testing, testing, affirmative, everything is running smoothly,” she wrote.
A parody by X owner Elon Musk ridiculed the outage. He added in another post, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
Meta workers have written on X that they cannot log in to work, extending the difficulties beyond its consumer-facing products. An employee of Meta Reality Labs reported being dismissed “mid-meeting.”
Nikita Bier, whose startup TBH was bought by Meta, said, “Last time Facebook did a forced logout of everyone, it was hacked, where adversaries leveraged a bug with the View-As feature.”
Meta did not say it was hacked today, but the timing prompted worries.
Two hours after the outage occurred, it was fixed. Stone said on X, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We regret the inconvenience and have fixed the problem swiftly for everyone affected.”
