Facebook and Instagram experienced a significant outage that lasted over two hours on Tuesday (Mar 4), affecting users worldwide. The outage, which began around 10 a.m. ET led to numerous reports on social media platform X of users being unable to access their accounts. The White House National Security Council kept an eye on the situation but found no evidence of malicious cyber activities related to the incident.
Downdetector.com, an outage tracking website, recorded more than 550,000 disruption reports for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram at the height of the outage. Meta Spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue on X, attributing the service interruptions to a technical problem that has since been resolved, though specifics of the situation were not disclosed.
The technical glitch impacted Meta’s stock, which saw a decrease of 1.2 percent in the afternoon trading. Meta, which boasts around 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of applications, including WhatsApp and Threads, also noted problems with the WhatsApp Business API during this period.
The outage sparked discussions among Meta employees on the anonymous messaging app Blind, with some expressing concerns over their job security due to being unable to access internal work systems. On X, the outage became a trending topic, with platform owner Elon Musk commenting on the reliability of his service in contrast to Meta’s downtime.
X itself has not been immune to service disruptions, with a significant outage in December following Musk’s acquisition, affecting tens of thousands of users globally. (NNT)
