Users of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms reported issues with both social media websites Tuesday morning for about an hour and a half.
According to the website DownDetector, which offers a heat map of outages being reported across the U.S., a number of cities showed elevated reports of outages for both platforms in cities like Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle beginning just before 11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT.
A little after 12 ET/9 PT, Meta spokesman Andy Stone share on X, formerly Twitter, that the issue had been resolved.
“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,” he wrote.
Outages reports first started to rise on DownDetector.
London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks said on X that four Meta platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads — are “currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries.” But the firm, which advocates for internet freedom, said there was no sign of “country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” which are typically imposed by governments.
Cybersecurity expert Matthew Green said the outage appears to go beyond Meta.
“There are a number of services having trouble with at least parts of their systems, particularly the ability to log into websites,” said Green, an associate professor of computer science and member of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. “This may indicate a common cause, like a failure at a major cloud services provider. At the moment nobody knows exactly what’s happening.”
The issues fall on Super Tuesday, a day where many users share their voting pride.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
