Meta's social media platforms — Facebook, Messenger and Instagram — were apparently offline Tuesday morning for more than an hour in a massive outage.
The platforms returned to service shortly after noon. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted on X, formerly known as Twitter, "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."
News media around the world were reporting the outage with stories of users accounts suddenly going offline and attempts to reconnect thwarted.
News Channel 8 in Tampa was reporting Meta’s social media platforms not working, with both Instagram and Facebook pulling up “failure to load” error pages. Stories in England's The Independent, Fox2 in St. Louis, Mo., and other sites all reported the down platforms.
The service monitoring website DownDetector Tuesday repoerted more than 520,000 outages around 11:15 a.m. and posted a message on its site saying "User reports indicate problems at Facebook."
Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.
Before12:30 most accounts had been returned to service with DownDetector reporting an outage in the 15 to 17,000 range instead of more than 500,000.
A senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.”
The outage comes just ahead of Thursday’s deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you. The Associated Press contributed to this report.