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Amidst a global outage that left Meta’s servers for all of its services down in several countries, Elon Musk confirmed on X that service was up and running. Must was joined by X CEO Linda Yaccarino, who didn’t hold back and in a later post after her confirmation threw shade at Meta and joked that people who wanted to check whether Instagram were down were using X. Meta’s outage comes after the platform’s availability in several countries that choose to allow social media access in their territories, unlike X, whose majority owner Musk has bemoaned on several occasions that his company has no choice but to comply with local governments when it comes to content restrictions.
Meta’s Facebook, Instagram Outage Follows Several Large Scale Cyberattacks In U.S.
While most internet users felt the pinch when their social media became unavailable for several hours, and continues to be unavailable worldwide, X usage is likely to have soared as it became the only functional major digital social medium in the U.S. As Musk and Yaccarino confirmed that their service was up and running roughly after 11 a.m, Meta didn’t seem to mind their comments as it chose the utility of the service formerly called Twitter and apologized roughly an hour later for the outage.
Outages like today’s have taken place before as well, but today’s was the first major Facebook outage for 2024. User reports on the popular website Down Detector indicated that the bulk of users experienced their inability to log into Facebook three hours back at 10 a.m Eastern time.
If we add the number of reports submitted to the website, then a little under two million users shared their status with Down Detector. A Facebook outage in 2021 was far more severe and it had set a new record for problem reports submitted.
We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) March 5, 2024
Meta’s apology was carefully worded as it avoided mentioning whether there was an outage when the post was shared. Its post read:
“We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked to quickly resolve!”
However, while Meta shared that users could not use its services “earlier”, X users and comm enters on Down Detector continued to report that they couldn’t access Facebook, Messenger or Instagram.
2024 has been a great year for Meta, with its push to expand away from social media now focused on artificial intelligence after an earlier venture into digital reality. The firm’s latest earnings came with a surprise dividend that sent the shares soaring, following a blood bath that had pushed Mark Zuckerberg several rungs down on the list of the world’s wealthiest in 2022.
Meta’s shares opened at record high in February, and while the stock was down less than 2% hours after the disruption. The 2021 outage, which remains the biggest to date had cost Meta $60 million in lost advertising revenue. Facebook’s DAUs, or daily active users, have grown slowly since then, and today’s outage follows persistent cyberattacks on healthcare companies such as United Health as part of an ongoing chain of cyber disruptions which appeared to have picked up the pace after efforts to tackle ransomware groups.
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024