Though we love to hate social media platforms, we also hate to love them as we log in the first chance we get in the morning to check out what's going on in the world, to see which famous person is airbrushing their lives into a picture-perfect image, and - for political junkies, to see what fires we have to try putting out.
But on Tuesday, users of the Facebook, Instagram, and Threads platforms woke up to quite a surprise when they tried to log on to those websites and apps: they were unable to access them, with some being told their passwords were invalid.
A lot of times in these situations, people will immediately rush to the platforms that are working to verify that there's a system-wide issue at the other sites and that it isn't just related to them personally. Case in point:
The hot trending topics this morning on Twitter/X: pic.twitter.com/d7DgGZYWJF
— Sister Toldjah 💙 (@sistertoldjah) March 5, 2024
As it turns out, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were indeed down Tuesday morning, with "widespread outages" reported:
DownDetector, a site that monitors internet service outages, said it has received more than 500,000 reports of problems by U.S. Facebook users and more than 70,000 reported problems with Instagram as of about 10:30 a.m. ET. The most frequently reported problems were with logging into the Facebook app and issues with the Instagram app, according to DownDetector.
"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our service," Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote on X, the former Twitter. "We are working on this now."
Facebook users from across the globe reported that they were unable to log in to the service, ranging from Egypt to Oklahoma, according to DownDetector. Some people on social media expressed concern that their accounts had been hacked because they had been booted out of the service and were unable to get back in with their passwords.
Naturally, this brought about a little ribbing of the Meta gang from Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk, who made sure to point out that Meta had to notify their users on his platform about their outages:
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
Though Musk understandably was having fun at the expense of his Big Tech rivals, he recently came under fire himself after it was discovered that Twitter had brought back the dreaded "reduced visibility" punishment for the so-called "misgendering" of transgender persons.
As RedState reported at the time, though, Musk's explanation did not go over well with users on the platform:
Using the correct sex based pronouns for someone is “harassment”? We’re being forced to lie? What about harassment in general? There are accounts who repeatedly target and harass specific individuals in an obsessive way. What constitutes “repeated” and “targeted” and why do only…
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) March 1, 2024
But back to Tuesday's outages, as of this writing, it appears that all three are, for now at least, back up and running. Which is good news in some respects and bad news in other respects if you think about it. ;)
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