Following reports across the internet on Tuesday that both Facebook and Instagram were down, a wave of theories sparked online pointing to potential reasons.
In a Tuesday post on X, formerly Twitter, Chuck Callesto, a social media strategist, noted the reported outage and questioned if China had something to do with it saying, "Facebook and Instagram DOWN possibly nationwide.. DEVELOPING..Has CHINA taken the next step?"
Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer turned political campaigner, posted to X saying, "On the largest primary voting day of the year...Nothing to see here folks."
Podcast host Tim Pool also took to X saying, "Cyber attack?"
However, it is not known what has caused the outage but Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, said in a post on X in part, "We are working on this now." Meta operates the popular social network platforms.
Context
Facebook and Instagram are two of the most popular social networking apps worldwide, owned and operated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. Last year, Facebook surpassed 3 billion daily active users. Instagram, meanwhile, was estimated to have around 1.2 billion daily active users around the same time.
Meanwhile, Super Tuesday is considered a pivotal part of the primary process as it represents a day in each presidential election primary cycle in which numerous states and territories all hold their primary races at the same time, adding up to roughly one-third of the winnable delegates for each party. The results of these races also most often signal who will become the eventual nominee for each party.
What We Know
On Tuesday, thousands of Facebook and Instagram users took to other platforms, like X, to report that they were unable to access either platform, suggesting that a companywide outage was taking place. On the popular site DownDetector, reports of issues with Facebook soared to nearly 300,000 at around 10:30 a.m. ET, while reports for Instagram hit nearly 72,000 around the same time.
Views
Following the outage some took to X to speculate as to the reason for the outage, noting the importance of Tuesday's political atmosphere. However, these theories are completely without evidence at this time.
X user Nick Adams wrote, "Facebook is down because it's woke.Twitter/X is working because it supports free speech. It's as simple as that!"
However, X user slammed the theories and notions that the outage is anything more than just technical difficulties.
"My Facebook is working. My Threads is also working. Just IG is out. Why do you people always assume that it is a conspiracy theory against Trump. lol. Desperation is heavy with you MAGA puppets."
Another X user Paulina, questioned the flood of theories and took aim at other platforms writing, "I often wonder WHY there's a lot of scrutiny vs TikTok, Facebook and IG when the majority of the cesspool of disinformation and conspiracy theories are very wide spread on Truth Social, Telegram and on here. It's disgusting."
What's Next?
A little over an hour after the outage, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the issue has been resolved, citing a technical issue, "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Update 3/5/24, 12:24 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 3/5/24, 12:50 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Natalie Venegas is a Weekend Reporter at Newsweek based in New York. Her focus is reporting on education, social justice ... Read more
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