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Meta‘s social media platforms Instagram, Facebook and Threads are back online after the platforms were down for about two hours Tuesday morning.
Facebook and Threads seemed to be particularly affected. Neither app was loading as of 10 a.m. ET, when reports of the outage started to surface on DownDetector.com. Instagram feeds weren’t refreshing for some users, while others could still access the app. Many Facebook users were unable to log in.
“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,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday.
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 such as Facebook and Instagram to reach voters.
The hashtags “#instagramdown” and “#facebookoutage” were trending on X on 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, such as 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.”
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