Login attempts are refused, and feeds stall as Google’s platform also faces login problems
Facebook and Instagram experienced severe issues globally on Tuesday, with services rejecting login attempts and feeds freezing. The outages were initially reported around 3.30pm GMT (10.30am EST, 2.30am AEDT) and started to resolve around 5pm. Meta addressed the problem in a statement on its newest social network, 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 noted that the problem primarily affected Facebook login, and Threads also experienced downtime during the outage.
The White House stated that it was monitoring the outage, which happened to coincide with Super Tuesday, a day when millions of Americans vote in presidential primary elections. A senior official from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency mentioned in a press call, “We are aware of the incident, and at this time we are not aware of any specific election-related connection or any specific malicious cyber activity.”
In an unusual turn of events, the problems occurred simultaneously with login issues on Google’s platform, hinting at a possible common cause behind the outages at the two tech giants, both of which predominantly manage their own infrastructure.
Meta’s business status page noted several disruptions, including “major disruptions” for the group’s admin center and for Facebook login, the feature that enables users to log in to third-party services using their Facebook credentials. This, in turn, resulted in some reports of outages on various other websites.
At 4pm GMT, Meta updated its status page to indicate an “unknown” status for all services except the Messenger API for Instagram. Some Meta services, like WhatsApp and the Facebook ads transparency page, seemed to be functioning normally. However, at 4:15pm, the Meta status page itself stopped working.
In his first post on X in a week, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone mentioned, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
The current outages are unlikely to reach the severity of Facebook’s 2021 outage. During that incident, a configuration error in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) caused the company to unintentionally remove its own address from systems that enable servers to communicate over the internet.
Although the error was quickly identified, it took several hours to implement and take effect the fix, partly due to the company’s engineers losing remote access to their servers and being unable to use their corporate passes to gain physical access through electronic locks.
Google has been approached for a comment.
