Mehta-owned Facebook, Messenger and Instagram suffered a global outage on Tuesday, leaving more than 500,000 users without access to the social media apps, the biggest setback for the tech giant in years. Ta.
Other major social media apps, including TikTok, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube video platform, also appear to be experiencing smaller service issues, according to DownDetector, a site that tracks web outage reports.
The outage, which has been reported in the United States as well as across Europe and Asia, began around 10:20 a.m. ET. TThe Meta-owned app was mostly back online as of 2pm ET. All other apps were working by this afternoon.
“Earlier today, technical issues made it difficult to access some of our services,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on the X account.
“We have resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected and apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
Earlier Tuesday, Stone addressed the disorder, writing: We are currently working on this. ”
X users had the predictably nasty reaction to Stone. One X user wrote, “I’m glad X works and let us know.”
The social media meltdown occurred ahead of the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in 16 U.S. states and one territory, sparking speculation online of a possible cyberattack.
However, a senior official at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said, “We are not aware of any link between a specific election or any specific malicious cyber activity with this outage.” Axios.
The Meta app outage was one of the longest on record since 2021, when Facebook and Instagram infamously went offline for more than six hours.
Company officials later claimed that the incident was due to an engineering “mistake on our part” that occurred while an employee was attempting to perform “routine maintenance.”
Meta stock fell more than 1.5% in Tuesday trading.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and later renamed it X, posted a meme mocking his social media rivals.
This meme depicts a character from the 2014 animated film Penguins of Madagascar. One of his characters representing X is seen being saluted by three of his others representing Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
According to Downdetector, there were more than 566,700 reports of Facebook outages by noon Tuesday.
Of those, 75% of reported issues were related to login.
The site also reported that more than 85,000 users encountered issues on Instagram.
Frustrated social media users took to the X platform and the hashtag #facebookdown started trending.
“While your FB and IG accounts have not been hacked, many users have reported that they appear to have been logged out of their accounts and are currently unable to log back in,” X user Brian Klassenstein posted.
Klassenstein included a video clip showing him trying and failing to log into Facebook.
