Social media platforms hit by wide outage

For a few hours, users are locked out of their Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads accounts.

A technical issue caused widespread login issues for a few hours across Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms Tuesday.

Andy Stone, Meta’s head of communications, acknowledged the issues on X, formerly known as Twitter, and said the company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts, and feeds on the platform as well as Threads and Instagram were not refreshing. WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.

A senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.”

Internet traffic observer Down Detector reported vast outages on several Meta platforms Tuesday. The problems were reported across the world.

London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks said on X that four Meta platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads — were “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.

The outage comes just ahead of Thursday’s deadline for major tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes including allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.

In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.