Woah, can you imagine freaking out because you can’t refresh your Instagram feed? That’s what actually happened on March 5, 2024! For a few hours, Facebook and Instagram were down worldwide. People were seriously confused – was it a hack? Were their accounts gone?
It was a total social media meltdown! Thankfully, it only lasted a couple of hours, but it definitely showed how much we all rely on scrolling through those feeds.
It all began around 10:45 AM EST on Tuesday when Meta’s platforms went belly up. Login woes and access issues plagued users for hours, with over 550,000 Facebook users, and 92,000 Instagramers reporting frustrations, stated outrage tracking website Down Detector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
This blackout stood in stark contrast to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a “more open and connected world.” The irony wasn’t lost on anyone, especially when Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, confirmed the outage with a simple message on a rival platform, X (formerly Twitter), “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services.”
Meta has over 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. While WhatsApp and Threads experienced some issues, they were minor compared to the widespread Facebook and Instagram blackout, according to Down Detector.
The blackout news spread like wildfire and swiftly became one of the top trending topics on X, with the platform’s owner and a rival of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, seizing the moment to take a dig at Meta. Musk’s post humorously remarked, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
However, the blackout wasn’t just restricted to the users. Meta employees themselves were freaking out on Tuesday. Confessions erupted on Blind, an anonymous messaging app, with employees freaking out that they couldn’t access their internal work systems. The outage sparked panic, with some employees even fearing they might have been laid off! Luckily, it turned out to be just a side effect of the bigger outage.
RR Author
Real Research News is the media platform that presents insights and studies of wide-range of topics. It focuses on insights gathered from its survey app.
