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Meta’s social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and Threads, suffered a two-hour outage on Tuesday morning, disrupting service to millions of users around the world.
Power outage warning started at 10 am. ET, users were unable to load Facebook and Threads, while some Instagram users had trouble updating their feeds.
In response to the issue, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone released a statement acknowledging technical issues on social media platform X and apologizing to users for any problems.
This disruption occurred alongside the US Super Tuesday presidential election, creating a challenge for political campaigns that rely on Facebook and Instagram to advertise to voters.
Social media users favored X, with hashtags like “#instagramdown” and “#facebookoutage” highlighting the widespread impact of service outages.
Meta’s shares fell more than 1% during the outage; This highlighted the financial impact for the company as well as technical issues.
In addition to its customer-facing platform, Meta also announced “significant disruptions” to other products, including the Meta Management Center, Facebook and Instagram stores, and WhatsApp Business API.
Google’s YouTube also acknowledged user-reported issues, including loading issues and YouTube Shorts errors, and referred users to its Support Team for updates.
It is also stated that users are experiencing problems with Google’s Gmail service, which causes delays in email sending. It is unclear whether these issues are related to the Meta platform outage.
After the major incident in 2021 where Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for more than six hours, the service outage was another major impact for Meta. This was due to “changes in the configuration of the rear routers,” the company said at the time.