KUALA LUMPUR – Facebook and Instagram, among others, are up and running after a global outage that lasted more than two hours.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone had to tweet on rival platform X to assure users that the outage was a technical issue, not a hack, as many speculated.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue… for everyone who was impacted,” tweeted Stone.
Meta also did not issue a statement on the outage as of 8am today (Malaysian time).
The outage impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally, more importantly, it took place on Super Tuesday, when millions of Americans are to vote in primaries in 15 states and one territory.
The National Security Council at the White House is reportedly monitoring the situation and was unaware of any specific malicious cyber activity during the outage.
At the peak of it, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Meta has some 3.19 billion daily active users across all its apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.
The outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector.
Since the outage, many Meta users turned to X to complain, with its top management taking a dig at their rivals.
X owner and billionaire Elon Musk tweeted, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
Musk also posted a meme of the penguins from the movie franchise Madagascar saluting his platform.
Meanwhile, X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted, “Testing, testing… affirmative, everything is functioning smoothly here.”
Global outages are not a novelty for X, as a service disruption in December affected more than 77,000 users in the west. – March 6, 2024