Meta’s popular social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, suffered an outage that lasted approximately two hours on Tuesday morning.
Users reported difficulties accessing Facebook and Threads from around 10 a.m. ET, while some Instagram users faced issues with feed refreshing and app access. The interruption was resolved by 12 p.m. ET. The hashtags “#instagramdown” and “#facebookoutage” trended on X, and Meta’s stock saw a decline of more than 1%.
In addition to the consumer platforms, Meta experienced “major disruptions” in its Meta Admin Center, Facebook and Instagram Shops, and WhatsApp Business API. As of 12 p.m. ET, services like Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, Facebook Login, Graph API, and Marketing API were recovering from disruptions.
Google’s YouTube also reported problems, including loading issues, blank homepages, and errors with YouTube Shorts. Users were directed to the “Help Community” post for more information. Some Gmail users experienced delays in email delivery, though it remains unclear if these issues were related to the Meta outages.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone addressed the situation on the social media site X, stating, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outages also coincided with Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., impacting political campaigns heavily reliant on Facebook and Instagram for voter outreach.
This incident follows a significant outage in 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for over six hours due to “configuration changes on backbone routers,” according to Meta, formerly known as Facebook.
