Users are opening their Facebook and Instagram apps and finding “failure to load” error pages in what appears to be a widespread outage on the platforms.
While it has since dropped, as of 10:37 a.m., DownDetector reported 470,764 outages on Facebook and 73,775 outages on Instagram at roughly the same time. Meta, the platform’s parent company, also saw their Messaging and Threads apps disrupted.
Andy Stone, Communications Director at Meta, took to X to acknowledge the issue.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” he posted.
“FB & IG” were trending on X on Tuesday, with some users making light of the outage and others revealing they thought their accounts were hacked.
“Me after trying to reset my password 25 times and still can’t log back in bc I think my FB is getting hacked only to realize that FB and IG is down,” said one user.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a major disruption that saw the platforms remain offline for over six hours. According to Meta, which was called Facebook at the time, the outage stemmed from “configuration changes on backbone routers.”
“Everyone who relys [sic] on FB and IG acting like they have to go back to living like this,” said one poster, referring to a clip of a horsedrawn buggy.
Some posters pointed to the outage coinciding with Super Tuesday, the primary election day in the country. User DC_Draino, who has 1.4 million followers on X, questioned if the event is a “Practice run for November?”
So far, no reason has been given for the cause of Tuesday’s outage, nor has any timeline for a resolution been given.
