Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back after global outage affects hundreds of thousands of users

CEO Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta Platforms Inc. said it has resolved the technical issues that disrupted service for hundreds of thousands of people across its family of social media apps on Tuesday, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Issues were also reported on other social media sites including YouTube and X.

Meta reacts to Massive outage

More than 500,000 people said they couldn’t access Facebook at around 10:30 a.m. in New York, according to Downdetector, which monitors internet and telecommunications disruptions. The number dropped to about 200,000 about 30 minutes later. There were more than 73,000 reports about Instagram at its peak and a smaller number of complaints about WhatsApp and Threads.

"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X social media.

The outage extended to some of Meta’s business tools, such as its Ads Manager, the Meta Admin Center and Facebook & Instagram Shops. Even Workplace, Meta’s internal version of Facebook for employees, was disrupted, according to two people familiar with the matter.

By about noon, Meta said it had resolved the issue “for everyone who was impacted.”

YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., had more than 3,000 reports that service was down at around 10:30 a.m. but that number quickly declined. Google said it’s working on a fix for the reported loading issues with YouTube.

Many people took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to complain about outages with Meta sites, including X’s owner Elon Musk. X had a small number of reported disruptions — almost 1,000 as of 11:00 a.m. That number was fewer than 250 by 11:45 a.m.

Bad actors at work?

Theories began to swirl around the internet about bad actors intentionally disrupting major social media sites on a big voting day in the US, known as Super Tuesday.

Biden administration officials said they hadn’t seen specific or credible threats attempting to disrupt presidential primary voting, but were monitoring the outages.

“We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity,” said a spokesperson for the National Security Council.

Facebook suffered a similar outage in October 2021 which was attributed to technical issues, not a security hack as originally feared.

At the height of the incident on Tuesday, Facebook's status page, intended for advertisers, said the site was suffering "major disruptions" and that "engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password.

On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.

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Reports said that Meta's virtual reality headsets were also suffering problems, with the device's Horizon World platform not allowing users to sign in.

Facebook is the world's largest social media platform, with three billion active monthly users.

Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.

X, formerly Twitter, saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.

"Testing, testing... affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here," wrote X CEO Linda Yaccarino, taking a dig at its rival.

US media focused on the fact that the outage took place on Super Tuesday, the day that millions of people were voting in primaries in 15 states and one territory.

(With inpts from Bloomberg, Reuters, AFP)

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