Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as its new app Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning. When loading the apps or websites, users receive an error message that “something went wrong” and to try again later, or, in the case of Facebook, they’re taken to a logged-out landing page but are unable to sign in even when using their correct password.
The troubles seem to have started at some point after 10 AM ET on Tuesday, according to reports on social media and various user-submitted issue trackers, like DownDetector. However, Meta’s own status page only shows results related to Meta’s business products, like Ads Manager, not the platforms as a whole. We’ve reached out to Meta to confirm the timing and the reports and will update when we hear back.
#Instagram, #Facebook and #Threads are currently down 🙄 pic.twitter.com/Zbpozhsn8F
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 5, 2024
It’s highly unusual for Meta to be experiencing a widespread outage like this, given the size and scale of its network and the redundancies built in. For that reason, some people are suspicious about the origins of this outage, particularly because it’s election day across a number of U.S. states, which means millions of people are headed to the polls to vote in the primary on what’s known as Super Tuesday. This outage, then, comes at a terrible time for any candidates or political organizations looking to do last-minute voter outreach efforts or those reminding people to go vote.
Meta’s suite of apps has played a large role during the election cycle, given its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, now reach 3.98 million monthly active users as of the end of last year, the company’s data shows. To quell its potential role in influencing the elections’ outcome, Meta disables political ads in the timeframe leading up to key elections, like the U.S. midterms. To address newer concerns, Meta also announced it would label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.
This story is developing…
