On Tuesday, March 5, 2024, social media fell offline due to a significant outage that affected Meta’s platforms all over the world. It apparently took hours for well-known social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to start operating again.
According to experts, this massive disruption not only disconnected billions of users but also had a significant financial impact on the corporation. Issue reports started rolling in at 10 a.m. ET, with reports indicating that Meta’s share price had fallen by 1.5%. But since then, it has decreased by 1.6%.
According to data from the real-time outage tracking platform Downdetector, as of 8:59 p.m., around 15,381 Indian users claimed that Facebook was down, and over 19,200 users reported an Instagram outage.
The director of communications at Meta, Andy Stone, used X to let people know that the firm, led by Mark Zuckerberg, is addressing the aforementioned problem.
We know that some users are experiencing difficulties using our services. We are now addressing this,” he wrote in a post on X.
The ‘technical issue’ has been resolved, Stone subsequently informed the users.
The website states that there were over 300,000 reports of Facebook outages worldwide and over 20,000 reports of Instagram outages.
The outage has triggered a meme frenzy on X, and the hashtags #instagramdown and #facebookdown quickly popped on ‘Trending Now,’ as people began posting about it.
With a jab at Meta, Elon Musk—who also owns X—stated, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”