The outages occurred on the same day as the Super Tuesday
presidential primaries in the U.S., when 16 states and one territory head to
the polls. The disruptions presented a problem for the presidential campaigns,
which rely heavily on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to reach voters.
The hashtags ”#instagramdown” and ”#facebookoutage” were
trending on X Tuesday morning. Shares of Meta were down more than 1%.
Additionally, Meta is experiencing “major disruptions” across
its Meta Admin Center, Facebook and Instagram Shops and WhatsApp Business API,
according to a company website that tracks the status of its business products.
Its Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, Facebook Login, Graph API and Marketing
API were all recovering from disruptions as of 12 p.m. ET.
Google’s YouTube also confirmed some of its users were
experiencing problems on Tuesday, like loading issues, a blank homepage, and
errors while attempting to play YouTube Shorts. YouTube directed users to follow
its “Help Community” post for more details, according to a post on X.
Some users are also having trouble with Google’s Gmail,
according to a company status dashboard. Users may experience delays with email
delivery, the dashboard said. It’s unclear if these problems are related to the
outages at Meta.
Meta’s service disruptions follow a major outage in 2021, when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours. At the time, Facebook, now Meta, said the outage was caused by “configuration changes on backbone routers.