What really happened to Facebook and Meta?

Reports of widespread outage hit Meta’s top social apps, Facebook and Instagram, along with newer app Threads, on Tuesday morning. Users encountered error messages upon attempting to load the apps or websites, indicating that “something went wrong” and advising to try again later.

Some Facebook users found themselves logged out and unable to sign back in even with the correct credentials. However, an update suggests that the apps are now functioning again.

The issues reportedly began after 4:00 pm. , as indicated by various user-submitted issue trackers like DownDetector and social media reports.

Meta’s own status page showed results only for its business products, such as Ads Manager, omitting information about the widespread platform outage.

Meta communications director Andy Stone acknowledged the problem, stating,

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

The outage, unusual for a company of Meta’s scale, has raised suspicions about its origins, particularly given the timing on Super Tuesday, an important day for elections across several U.S. states.

Meta’s suite of apps, which includes WhatsApp, plays a significant role during election cycles, reaching nearly 4 million monthly active users as of last year.

To mitigate potential election influence, Meta has previously disabled political ads leading up to key elections and announced plans to label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.

While Amazon’s Web Services show no recent issues, Meta operates its own data centers, potentially causing problems independent of AWS.

Although other platforms like YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) are currently functional, Meta employees have reported login issues on X as well, indicating a broader problem affecting company operations.

Concerns have been raised about a possible hack, especially considering Meta’s history of security breaches. Notably, Facebook experienced a global outage in 2022, disrupting video streaming and messaging services.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed that X is unaffected by the outage, while X owner Elon Musk humorously acknowledged the situation with a meme. The timing and extent of the outage have prompted questions about Meta’s infrastructure stability and cybersecurity measures.