Meta users experience hours-long outage on Super Tuesday

Spokesman Andy Stone confirmed that the company “resolved the issue” that caused a two-hour blackout for Meta’s Facebook and Instagram users on Tuesday morning. Over 600,000 Facebook users reported the outage to Downdetector, with at least 90,000 Instagram users reporting the same. Outages on a much smaller scale were also reported on Meta’s Threads and WhatsApp. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), poked fun at his competitor’s outage by assuring users, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

What caused the crash? Stone said an unspecified “technical issue” was responsible for the crash. Meta formally apologized for the outage in a separate post and thanked users for their patience without citing the cause of the crash. Meta suffered a similar blackout in October 2021, which Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said resulted from “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic.”

Didn’t this just happen? The Meta outage comes on the heels of a national AT&T cellular outage less than two weeks ago. Some users noted that the Meta outage occurred on Super Tuesday and questioned whether a cyber attack may be responsible.

Dig deeper: Read my report on the FCC opening an investigation into the AT&T outage last month.