During afternoon trading, Meta’s shares fell by 1.2% as a result of the outage experienced by its social media platforms, including Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. The disruption lasted for over two hours and affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide due to a technical issue.
The problem began around 8:30 pm (IST), with users reporting difficulties accessing their Facebook and Instagram accounts on rival social media platform X. The White House National Security Council stated that they were monitoring the situation but found no indication of specific malicious cyber activity at that time.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, there were over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and approximately 92,000 for Instagram at the peak of the outage. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the technical problem in a statement on X but did not provide further details about its nature.
In response to the outage, Meta’s shares experienced a 1.2% dip during afternoon trading. The company did not immediately offer additional information about the technical glitch.
Meta’s suite of platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads, has about 3.19 billion daily active users. The company’s status dashboard indicated issues with the WhatsApp Business application programming interface as well. However, the impact on WhatsApp and Threads was relatively minor compared to Facebook and Instagram, according to Downdetector’s data.
Employees at Meta expressed concerns on the anonymous messaging app Blind, reporting difficulties logging into internal work systems and speculating about potential lay-offs.
The outage quickly became a trending topic on X, with platform owner Elon Musk making a jest at Meta’s expense, suggesting that if users could read his post, it was because X’s servers were operational. X itself has faced disruptions since Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, with a December outage affecting over 77,000 users across multiple countries.
