Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms suffered a significant outage on the morning of Super Tuesday that now appears to be resolved.
Experts at three organizations that monitor internet traffic, Kentik, NetBlocks and ThousandEyes, confirmed that Meta’s various companies — Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger — experienced a major drop in traffic Tuesday morning.
The outage, which spanned multiple countries, was related to how users log in, Netblocks said, and it appeared that many Facebook users had been logged out of their accounts. At the time of the outage, Meta's servers were still online and reachable, ThousandEyes said, indicating that the problem was most likely a backend service issue.
Major political campaigns use some of those services, especially Facebook, and the outage may have prevented them from engaging with constituents on Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one U.S. territory hold presidential primaries and five states hold Senate, House, governor and local primaries.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone indicated Tuesday afternoon that the issue had been resolved.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” he wrote on X.
“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” he said.
In a media call with reporters about the election, a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency was aware of the outage. “At this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity,” the official said.
Some of the traffic began to come back after about an hourlong outage, said Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, and some users reported being able to log back in.
Intermittent disruptions of even major websites are often the results of configuration issues, and they are usually quickly solved. It wasn’t immediately fully clear what Meta’s issue was.
Meta's status page, which gives updates on which of its products are experiencing outages, didn't load for a period Tuesday morning, but it now says its services are all recovering from disruption or that the issues have been resolved.