Facebook, Instagram and Threads services were affected globally around 8.50pm (IST) on Tuesday, locking users out.
Users of the platforms flocked to X (formerly Twitter) to complain about the outage. Services were gradually restored around 10.30pm.
Down Detector, which reports outages across digital services and phone networks globally, showed spikes for Facebook and Instagram. Within 30 minutes there were over 40,000 reports for Instagram and Facebook. It’s unusual for all the Meta social media platforms to go down together and this may have taken Americans by surprise because March 5 was Super Tuesday when 16 US states and one territory held primary votes.
London-based Internet monitoring firm Netblocks, which advocates Internet freedom, said on X there was no sign of “country-level Internet disruptions or filtering”, which are typically imposed by governments.
Facebook logged many users out of their accounts and did not allow them to log back in for close to two hours. On Instagram, many users were unable to refresh their feeds and some accounts were unable to refresh stories and comments.
Threads, which is the latest social media platform from Meta, was also down, displaying an error message that read: “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” But WhatsApp, which too is owned by Meta, didn’t suffer an outage.
Meta communications director Andy Stone confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
The outage also came ahead of a deadline on Wednesday for Meta and other tech giants to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law that aims to increase competition in the digital economy.
The service disruption followed a major outage in 2021 when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours.
Taking a jibe at Meta, Elon Musk, the owner of X, said on Tuesday: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”