Why did Facebook go down? A visual exploration of the major Meta outage

At approximately 10:30 a.m. EST on Tuesday, a significant outage hit Facebook, affecting nearly 2.4 million users worldwide. The issue, which began around 30 minutes earlier, quickly escalated, causing widespread disruption.

According to Downdetector by Ookla, an internet connectivity tracking service, over 1.8 million reports flooded in from users across the United States by noon.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and other platforms, attributed the outage to a technical glitch.

The disruption left many users unable to access their Facebook accounts, with attempts to log back in proving futile. Service restoration was largely completed by 1 p.m., although some users continued to experience lingering issues.

The timing of the outage coincided with Super Tuesday, a crucial day for primary elections and caucuses in 15 states and one territory for the upcoming presidential election.

Users attempting to log in were greeted with messages stating, “Session expired, please log in again,” followed by “the password you’ve entered is incorrect,” adding to the frustration.

When did outages happen?

Downdetector highlighted that the primary issue reported by users was the inability to log into Facebook.

What problems did most Facebook users encounter?

This isn’t the first time Facebook has faced access issues; in 2021, users experienced hours-long disruptions attributed to network problems during a maintenance operation.

Which US cities had the most access problems?

The outage wasn’t limited to the United States; reports also surfaced from the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, and Japan, as noted by The New York Times.