A technical issue caused widespread login issues for a few hours across Meta's Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger platforms on Tuesday. Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts, and feeds on the platform, as well as Threads and Instagram, were not refreshing. However, WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected during the outage.
Meta's head of communications acknowledged the issues on social media and stated that the problem was resolved as quickly as possible for those impacted. The company apologized for any inconvenience caused by the disruption.
Despite the widespread login issues, a senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency mentioned that there was no specific election or malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.
The outage occurred just before the deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act. Meta is making changes to comply with the regulations, such as allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts to prevent the combination of personal information for targeted online ads. It remains unclear whether the outage is related to any preparations Meta might be undertaking for the DMA.
This is not the first time Meta platforms have experienced outages. In 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for hours due to faulty changes on routers coordinating network traffic between data centers. The following year, WhatsApp experienced another brief outage.
