Widespread Outage Hits Meta's Leading Social Platforms
Meta's prime social platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and the recently launched Threads, were hit by an extensive service disruption on Tuesday morning. Users were unable to log in to their accounts and experienced stalled feeds across these platforms.
Meta's Outage: What Happened?
Around 10 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday, reports began to flood in about the outage affecting Meta's key social platforms. Users trying to access the apps or websites were met with error messages stating that "something went wrong" and were prompted to try again later. In Facebook's case, users were redirected to a logged-out landing page and were unable to sign back in even with the correct password.
According to user-submitted issue trackers like DownDetector, the troubles seemed to have started around 10 AM ET on Tuesday. However, Meta's own status page only displays results related to Meta's business products like Ads Manager, not the platforms as a whole.
Unusual Outage Sparks Suspicion
Meta's widespread outage is highly unusual, considering the size and scale of its network and the redundancies built in. Meta's suite of apps, including WhatsApp, reach 3.98 million monthly active users as of the end of last year, according to the company's data.
This disruption came at an inconvenient time for political candidates and organizations conducting last-minute voter outreach efforts on Super Tuesday. Facebook and Instagram play a massive role during election cycles, and this outage could have hampered those reminding people to vote.
Meta Addresses Issues
Meta's business status page reported numerous disruptions, including "major disruptions" for the group's admin center and Facebook Login. This, in turn, led to reports of outages at a variety of other sites.
Meta's communications head, Andy Stone, acknowledged the issue in a tweet, stating that the company was aware people were having trouble accessing their services and that they were "working on this now."
Other Tech Giants Hit by Outages
Interestingly, the issues with Meta's platforms coincided with login problems on Google's platform, raising suspicion of a common cause between the outages at these two tech conglomerates that largely control their own infrastructure.
Google's ads status page reported a disruption to the company's Ad Manager beginning around the same time as Meta's outage. The company said it was investigating reports of other issues. However, Google's issues were more contained than those of Meta, with most consumer-facing services, including search and YouTube, functioning as usual. Problems with the company's login service, though, affected some business customers.
Impact of the Outage
The impact of this outage is yet to be fully assessed. It's unlikely to be as severe as Facebook's 2021 outage, where a configuration error in a little-known protocol called BGP led to the company accidentally deleting its own address from the systems that allow servers to communicate with each other on the internet. That error was spotted immediately, but it took several hours for the fix to be enacted and take effect.
Conclusion
As of now, the exact cause of the outage is unknown. However, a systemic internet issue is likely to be the root cause, with sporadic issues also being reported by users of other sites, including X and Microsoft's Teams.
While this is not the first time Meta's platforms have experienced an outage, the scale of this disruption was significant. The company will likely be working to not only resolve the current issues but also to prevent such a widespread outage from happening in the future.