Facebook, Instagram and YouTube users fume as social media giants face global outage

Meta-owned Facebook, Messenger and Instagram experienced worldwide outages Tuesday, with more than half a million users unable to access the social media apps in one of the tech giant’s largest glitches in years.

Other major social media apps, including TikTok, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube video platform, also appeared to suffer service issues on a smaller scale, according to DownDetector, a site that tracks web outage reports.

The outages — reported across Europe and Asia as well as the US — began around 10:20 a.m. ET. The Meta-owned apps were mostly back online as of 2 p.m. ET. All other apps were working by this afternoon..

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on his X account.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Stone addressed the outages, writing: “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

X users responded to Stone with predictable snark. “Good thing X works to let us know,” wrote one X user.

The social media meltdown occurred ahead of the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in 16 states and one US territory and prompted some online speculation of a potential cyber-attack.

However, a senior official with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it was “not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage,” according to Axios.

The Meta app outage was among the longest on record since 2021, when Facebook and Instagram infamously went offline for more than six hours.

Company officials later attributed that incident to an engineering “error of our own making” that occurred while employees were trying to conduct “routine maintenance.”

Meta shares fell more than 1.5% in Tuesday trading.

Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion and then renamed it X, posted a meme mocking his social media rival.

The meme depicts characters from the 2014 animated film “Penguins of Madagascar.” One of the characters, who represents X, is seen being saluted by three others who represent Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

According to Downdetector, there were more than 566,700 reports of Facebook outages before noon on Tuesday.

Of those, 75% of the reported problems had to do with the login.

The site also reported more than 85,000 users encountered problems with Instagram.

Frustrated social media users took to the X platform, where the hashtag #facebookdown was trending.

“Your FB & IG accounts have NOT been hacked, but many users have been reporting that they appears to have been logged out of their accounts and can not currently log back into them,” X user Brian Krassenstein posted.

Krassenstein included a video clip showing him unsuccessfully trying to log in to Facebook.