Reports are flowing that quite a few of the top social apps in Meta, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, are down across Tuesday morning. Instead, users receive an error message trying to load the apps or websites stating "something went wrong" and to try again later. Or, for Facebook, they are brought to a landing page showing them to be logged out but are unable to sign back in when using their proper password.

Reports on social media and user-sent issue trackers, including DownDetector suggest the outage started sometime after 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Meta's own status page does not have any reported results involving the general platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, but it only has results regarding Meta's business products, like Ads Manager. We've asked Meta to verify the timeline and claims, and will update you with any more information as is provided. For now, Meta communications director Andy Stone went to X to confirm: "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.".

This is really unusual for Meta given the scale and size of its network, with the redundancies built into it. For those reasons, many people are suspicious of the cause of this outage, especially because it's election day in a number of states around the U.S., which means millions are going to the polls to vote in the primary on what's known as Super Tuesday. Then, this blackout comes at a terrible time for any candidates or political organizations looking to make last-minute voter outreach efforts or reminding people to go vote.

https://twitter.com/mkarolian/status/1765044318669062438

Meta's suite of apps has proven to be a significant player during this election cycle, given that its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, now reach 3.98 million monthly active users as of the end of last year, the company's data shows. As such, Meta decided to disable political ads during that critical period preceding key elections, including the U.S. midterms. Regarding even newer concerns, Meta recently announced that it would label AI-generated imagery in political ads for the 2024 election cycle.

Related to elections and social media chatter, Meta last week said it would be exiting the news business in the U.S. and Australia when it eliminates the News tab in April 2024.

Amazon Web Services' service health status is reporting no recent issues, but Meta runs its own data centers, so it is possible it is seeing an issue, independent of what AWS is seeing or not seeing.

Other users have also chimed in saying other services like YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) are not experiencing issues, at least not as of this writing.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino went straight to social media shortly after the Meta outage news broke to reassure her followers that X was not seeing any issues of its own.

"Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here," she wrote.

X owner Elon Musk, for instance, has derided the outage with a meme. In another post, he also said, "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working."

Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here. ????

Yet the issues appear to extend beyond consumer-facing apps since company employees also posted on X stating they are unable to access work as well. Indeed, one Meta Reality Labs employee stated they were even boot out of work "mid meeting."

Last time Facebook did a forced logout of everyone, it was hacked, where adversaries leveraged a bug with the View-As feature," remarked app developer Nikita Bier, whose app TBH is acquired by Meta.

Meta did not indicate that it was hacked today, but the timing had raised people's concerns.

About two hours after the outage began, it was resolved. In a post to X, Stone wrote: "Earlier today, people experienced trouble reaching some of our services due to a technical issue. We worked as quickly as we could to resolve the issue for everyone who was affected and regret any inconvenience."

We are aware that a technical issue this morning has made it challenging for some to access parts of our service. We fixed the problem as quickly as possible for everyone, but we apologize for the inconvenience. https://t.co/ybyyAZNAMn