Facebook, Messenger and Instagram down for many as Meta contends with outage on Super Tuesday

Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms suffered a significant outage on the morning of Super Tuesday.

Experts at three organizations that monitor internet traffic, Kentik, NetBlocks, and ThousandEyes, confirmed that Meta’s various companies — Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger — were experiencing a major drop in traffic Tuesday morning.

The outages were 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. Meta’s servers are still online and reachable, ThousandEyes said, indicating that the problems were most likely a backend service issue.

Some of those services, especially Facebook, are used by major political campaigns, and the outages may prevent them from engaging with constituents on Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one U.S. territory hold presidential primaries, and five states hold Senate, House, governor and local primaries.

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.

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.

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

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