Services are rejecting login attempts and feeds are stalling, mirroring Google’s login issues
Facebook and Instagram faced widespread issues globally on Tuesday, including login failures and stalled feeds. The outages, which began around 3:30pm GMT (10:30am EST, 2:30am AEDT), started to subside by approximately 5pm. Meta addressed the problem in a statement on its latest social platform, Threads, just after 7pm GMT, stating, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience.” The company indicated that the main issue was with Facebook login, and Threads was also affected during the outage.
The White House stated that it was monitoring the outage, which occurred on Super Tuesday, a day when millions of Americans participate in presidential primary elections. A senior official from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency mentioned during a press call, “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.”
The issues occurred simultaneously with login problems on Google’s platform, suggesting a common cause for the outages at both tech conglomerates, which largely manage their own infrastructure.
Meta’s business status page indicated several disruptions, including “major disruptions” for the group’s admin center and Facebook login, the service that enables users to log in to third-party services using their Facebook credentials. This led to reports of outages on various other sites.
At 4pm GMT, Meta updated its status page to reflect an “unknown” status for all services except for the Messenger API for Instagram. Some Meta services, like WhatsApp and the Facebook ads transparency page, appeared to be functioning. However, at 4:15pm, the Meta status page became unavailable.
In his first post on X in a week, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Google’s ads status page indicated a disruption to the company’s Ad Manager starting around 3:30pm GMT. The company stated that it was looking into reports of other issues. However, Google’s disruptions were more limited than Meta’s, as most consumer-facing services, such as search and YouTube, continued to operate normally. Nonetheless, issues with the company’s login service impacted some business customers, including the Guardian.
A widespread internet problem is likely the underlying cause, as users of various sites, including X and Microsoft’s Teams, have reported sporadic issues.
The current outages are unlikely to reach the severity of Facebook’s 2021 outage, caused by a configuration error in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that resulted in the company inadvertently deleting its own address from systems facilitating internet server communication.
While the error was quickly identified, it took several hours to implement a fix. This delay was partly due to the inability of Facebook’s engineers to remotely access their servers or use corporate passes to physically access them.
Google has been asked for a response regarding the recent outages.