News/Commentary

‘Coincidence?’ Folks flock to X in droves as Meta platforms hit with significant outages on Super Tuesday

March 5, 2024 | | Print Article

As Super Tuesday kicked off, Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms suffered a significant outage while X’s Elon Musk practically did a Snoopy Dance over it.

“Experts at two organizations that monitor internet traffic, Kentik, and NetBlocks, confirmed that Meta’s various companies — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger — were experiencing a major drop in traffic,” MSNBC reported.

“The outages are related to how users log in and span multiple countries, Netblocks said, and it appeared that many Facebook users had been logged out of their accounts,” the media outlet added.

As hundreds of thousands of people across the globe realized that the platforms were down, so did Elon Musk who took an enthusiastic dig at Meta over it.

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“The disruptions started around 10:00 am ET, with more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website,” Reuters reported.

Ironically, a number of major political campaigns use Facebook heavily. The outage could prevent the engagement of constituents on Super Tuesday as 16 states and one U.S. territory hold presidential primaries according to MSNBC. Five states are holding Senate, House, governor, and local primaries as well. Google ads were also down for many.

“In a press call with reporters about the election a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency was aware of the outage. ‘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 official said,” MSNBC wrote.

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“Intermittent disruptions of even major websites are often a configuration issue and are usually quickly solved. It wasn’t immediately fully clear what Meta’s issue was or what the timetable was for it to be fixed,” the outlet noted.

Some saw a potentially deeper meaning to the outage and gave voice to it.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone ironically wrote on X.

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“Meta’s own status page, which gives updates on which of the company’s products are experiencing outages, didn’t load Tuesday morning,” MSNBC reported.

As the outage spread, hilarity ensued on X:

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