Facebook and Instagram appears to be coming back online as of 12:30 p.m. ET after a nationwide outage. Roughly 580,000 Facebook users and 92,000 Instagram users experienced issues, according to Down Detector. White House officials are monitoring the outage, according to the Wall Street Journal, which started just after 10:00 a.m. ET on Super Tuesday, as 15 American states hold primaries for the 2024 Presidential Election.
“We are recovering from an earlier outage impacting Facebook Login, and services are in the process of being restored,” said Meta on its status page. “We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
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Meta reported major disruptions across its family of products on Tuesday morning. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads all showed spikes in user-reported issues. Many users reported being logged out of their Facebook accounts, with no ability to sign back in. Gizmodo reporters also experienced the issue. There’s no indication this is because of a hack, according to White House officials, but the Biden administration is monitoring the situation.
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“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,” a senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official said during a press call.
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The Super Tuesday outage seems to be recovering, though many voters get information about primary elections from Facebook and Instagram. Facebook offers “voting reminders” to its users, while Instagram has helped users register to vote since 2018.
Other apps, including YouTube and Google also showed spikes in outages on Tuesday morning. It’s unclear if these are related. Many users took to X, which was largely unaffected, to report their grievances with Meta’s outage. Facebook and Instagram were trending topics Tuesday morning with tens of thousands of posts on Elon Musk’s platform.
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Meta’s status page showed all of its products with an “unknown” status at 11:35 a.m. ET, roughly an hour and a half after the outage began.
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Last year, there was another widespread outage affecting major social media applications, including Facebook and Instagram. These outages are typically resolved in less than 24 hours, and there is rarely a reason that comes to light. In that case, there was not a clear reason. However, hundreds of thousands of users were affected and couldn’t access their apps for roughly a day.
Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment and will update the story when the company gets back to us.
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