Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads back up after global outage; what exactly happened?

 Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads back up after global outage; what exactly happened

Meta-owned social media giants Facebook, Threads and Instagram experienced a widespread outage on Tuesday, disrupting access for hundreds of thousands of users globally for over two hours due to a technical issue.

The disruption began around 8.30 pm (IST), with reports flooding in from users on rival social media platform X, complaining of being unable to access their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

The White House National Security Council stated that it was monitoring the situation, assuring that there was no indication of any specific malicious cyber activity at that time.

At the height of the outage, over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram were recorded, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone addressed the issue in a statement on X, acknowledging the technical problem without providing further details on its nature.

Shares of Meta dipped by 1.2% during afternoon trading in response to the outage. The company did not immediately respond to requests for additional information regarding the technical glitch.

With a user base of about 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads, Meta's status dashboard indicated issues with the WhatsApp Business application programming interface as well.

However, the impact on WhatsApp and Threads was comparatively minor, as per Downdetector's data, which aggregates outage reports from various sources.

Concerns among Meta employees surfaced on the anonymous messaging app Blind, with some expressing difficulty logging into internal work systems and speculating about potential lay-offs.

The outage quickly became a top trending topic on X, with platform owner Elon Musk chiming in with a quip aimed at Meta's expense, suggesting that if users were able to read his post, it was because X's servers were operational.

X itself has faced its share of disruptions since Musk's acquisition of the platform in October 2022, with a December outage affecting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.