A technical error at Meta left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access the company’s social media platforms on one of the biggest days in this presidential primary season.
Meta asserts the problem has been resolved.
But Facebook users continued to report problems accessing the social media site on other social media platforms on Tuesday, even after a Meta spokesperson reported the problem was fixed.
Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, and posters on the website downdetector.com, were reporting issues as of 12:45 p.m. with two-factor authentication to log in from a mobile device.
Several commenters rejected the statements from Facebook and a Meta spokesperson asserting that the problem was fixed.
Nolan Higdon, a professor of history and communications at California State University East Bay, was critical of how the company communicated the outage.
“I think they did an embarrassing job,” Higdon said. “It was near impossible to get any information from Facebook for the first hour explaining what happened.”
Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, first acknowledged an outage through a post on X at 7:52 a.m. In an update at 9:19 a.m., Stone said the problem was fixed, but did not offer an explanation.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” he posted. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
An X account for Facebook also welcomed users back at 10:10 a.m., but many commenters complained in the comments section of that post that they were still having login trouble.
Higdon said lack of regulation has left Meta and other tech companies to create their own policies for reporting service problems, which often leaves consumers in the dark when it comes to an increasingly critical information source.
A not-so-super Tuesday
The outage came on Super Tuesday, when voters in California and 15 other states and territories voted in the presidential primary. It affected all of Meta’s apps including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
Higdon said that as the electorate relies more on social media to stay informed, transparency around such outages and public access to that information will have growing importance.
At its peak, more than 575,000 users reported problems accessing Facebook, according to downdetector.com, which tracks social media and website outages. Some users there were still reporting partial service, lack of access, and reduced functionality as of 1 p.m., with about 5,000 reports of outages.
Meta, still called Facebook at the time, purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion in cash and stock, according to Meta.
Higdon said that WhatsApp is the primary method of communication in many countries, and that government regulators around the globe should be aware of the impact it can have when multiple digital outlets are controlled by one company.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct errors in an earlier version that attributed Tuesday’s outage to a security breach. An unrelated company also named Meta was contacted for the story and their statement should not have been included.