Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms owned by Meta suffered a significant outage on Super Tuesday, impacting user logins and hindering political campaigns. The issue has been resolved, and there was no indication of election-related or malicious cyber activity.
Meta Platforms Experience Outage on Super Tuesday
( Credit to: Nbcnews )
Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms owned by Meta experienced a significant outage on Super Tuesday morning. Experts from Kentik, NetBlocks, and ThousandEyes confirmed that Meta's services suffered a major drop in traffic. The outage affected Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger, and appeared to be related to user logins, according to NetBlocks. Many Facebook users were logged out of their accounts during this time.
The outage occurred in multiple countries and primarily impacted the backend services of Meta's platforms. Despite the disruption, Meta's servers remained online and accessible. This suggested that the issue was likely a backend service problem rather than a complete server failure, as noted by ThousandEyes.
The outage had potential implications for political campaigns, as Facebook and other services are commonly used for engaging with constituents. Super Tuesday, a crucial day in the United States' election cycle, saw 16 states and one U.S. territory hold presidential primaries, along with five states conducting Senate, House, governor, and local primaries. The outage may have hindered campaigns from effectively reaching out to voters.
Resolution and Impact on Political Campaigns
Approximately an hour after the outage began, some of the services started to recover, and users reported being able to log back into their accounts. Intermittent disruptions on major websites are often attributed to configuration issues, which are typically resolved quickly. However, the specific cause of Meta's outage was not immediately clear.
Meta's own status page, which provides updates on service disruptions, experienced difficulties loading during the outage. However, it now indicates that the services are recovering or that the issues have been resolved.
In conclusion, the outage that affected Meta's platforms on Super Tuesday has been resolved, and users should now be able to access their accounts without any further disruptions. The incident did not appear to have any direct impact on the election or involve any malicious cyber activity, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
