Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms suffered a significant outage on the morning of Super Tuesday that now appears to be resolved.
Experts at three organizations that monitor internet traffic, Kentik, NetBlocks and ThousandEyes, confirmed that Meta’s various companies — Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger — experienced a major drop in traffic Tuesday morning.
The outage, which spanned multiple countries, was related to how users log in, Netblocks said, and it appeared that many Facebook users had been logged out of their accounts. At the time of the outage, Meta’s servers were still online and reachable, ThousandEyes said, indicating that the problem was most likely a backend service issue.
Some of those services, especially Facebook, are used by major political campaigns, and the outage may have prevented them from engaging with constituents on Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one U.S. territory hold presidential primaries, and five states hold Senate, House, governor and local primaries.
In a media call with reporters about the election, a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency was aware of the outage. “We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity,” the official said.
Some of the traffic began to come back after about an hourlong outage, said Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, and some users reported being able to log back in.
Meta’s own status page, which gives updates on which of the company’s products are experiencing outages, didn’t load for a period on Tuesday morning, but now says its services are all recovering from disruption or that the issues are resolved.
Intermittent disruptions of even major websites are often a configuration issue and are usually quickly solved. It wasn’t immediately fully clear what Meta’s issue was.
Meta Platforms Experienced Signal Outage on Tuesday
