Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Issues Resolved after Services Disrupted on Super Tuesday

Meta Platforms said it had resolved technical issues that disrupted services for hundreds of thousands of people across its social media apps on Tuesday, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Issues were also reported on other social media sites including YouTube and X.

More than 500,000 people said they were unable to access Facebook around 10:30 a.m. in New York, according to DownDetector, which monitors internet and communications outages. The number decreased to about 200,000 after about 30 minutes. The number of reports about “Instagram” peaked at more than 73,000 reports, amid a smaller number of complaints about “WhatsApp” and “Threads”.

The outage of services extended to some of Meta's business tools, such as Ads Manager, the Meta Admin Center, Facebook and Instagram stores, and even Workplace, Meta's internal version of Facebook for employees, was disrupted, according to two people familiar with the matter.

By around noon, Meta said it had resolved the issue "for everyone affected."

More than 3,000 people reported that the Alphabet-owned YouTube service was down around 10:30 a.m., but that number quickly declined. Google said it is working to resolve the upload issues reported on YouTube.

Many people took to the "X" platform, formerly known as "Twitter", to complain about the outage of service on "Meta" sites, including Elon Musk, owner of "X". A small number of crashes were reported to X—nearly 1,000 at 11:00 a.m.—and that number dropped to less than 250 by 11:45 a.m.

Assumptions have begun circulating online that bad actors intentionally crashed major social media sites on a major voting day in the United States, known as Super Tuesday.

Biden administration officials said they had not seen specific or credible threats trying to disrupt the presidential primary vote, but they were monitoring interruptions, according to the Wall Street Journal.