Jacob Brown
On Tuesday morning, users of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger platforms encountered issues that rendered the social media websites inaccessible for about an hour and a half.
Reports of outages surged across various cities in the United States, including Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, starting just before 11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT, as indicated by DownDetector, a website tracking service disruptions.
Resolution of the Issue:
Meta spokesman Andy Stone, via X (formerly Twitter), announced around 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT that the technical issue had been resolved.
Stone apologized for any inconvenience caused, assuring users that the problem was promptly addressed.
The extent of the Outages:
According to London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads experienced outages related to login sessions across multiple countries.
However, the firm reported no indication of country-level internet disruptions or filtering typically imposed by governments.
Speculation on the Cause:
Cybersecurity expert Matthew Green suggested that the outage might extend beyond Meta, affecting the ability of various services to log into websites.
Green, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, speculated that the common cause could be a failure at a major cloud services provider, although the exact cause remained unknown.
Impact on Super Tuesday:
The outages occurred on Super Tuesday, a significant day for many users to share their voting pride, underscoring the inconvenience experienced by individuals attempting to engage with social media platforms during this important event.
