Social media goes haywire on ‘super’ Tuesday

It suddenly felt like the coming of Christ for a lot of social media users on Tuesday when they logged onto their meta owned accounts of Facebook and Instagram just to notice their social media presence gone.

For some Facebook users, it felt like their accounts had been hacked, while Instagram users noticed some glitches when logging on to their apps.

Also on YouTube, streamers reported different problems too, with users confused as to why the streaming platform would go dark all of a sudden.

Users reported difficulties loading videos on YouTube, while platforms like Discord and Meta’s apps were completely down.

According to a post on Google’s support page, social media users encountered issues such as empty home pages, error messages, and spinning wheels while scrolling on YouTube Shorts, with some users running out of videos to watch on the platform’s infinite feed. The post assured users that efforts were underway to resolve the problems promptly.

YouTube also provided an update via its X account, directing users to the support page for more information.

The root cause of the social media outage remains unclear. While it’s not uncommon for multiple platforms to go down simultaneously due to shared cloud computing services like AWS, Amazon Web Services reported no issues.

Additionally, companies like Meta and Google have their own data centers, reducing reliance on external providers and making such widespread outages unusual.