Elon Musk Takes Jab at Meta Over Facebook, Instagram Outage

Social media users faced difficulties accessing Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday evening, leading to confusion and frustration.

Facebook users were unable to log in, while Instagram feeds could not be refreshed and comments remained unresponsive. This outage prompted a surge in users on X, formerly known as Twitter, who expressed their concerns, some believing their accounts had been compromised.

Amidst the disruption, Elon Musk, the CEO of X, took a jab at his rival platform with a tweet stating, "If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working," highlighting the contrasting experiences on the two platforms. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has acknowledged the issue through its Communications Director Andy Stone who confirmed via X that they were working to address the technical difficulties.

The outage was resolved shortly after 7 pm local time, restoring normal functionality to both platforms. The significant increase in traffic on X during the downtime has been noted by Guinness World Records as a potential new record for the most concurrent users on the platform. They mentioned that their team would be investigating this possibility.

During the disruption, the White House National Security Council monitored the incident but they did not identify any malicious cyber activity. According to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks online outages, the issue peaked with over 550,000 disruption reports for Facebook and 92,000 for Instagram. Meta whose stock price declined by 1.2% during afternoon trading did not immediately respond to requests for further details regarding the technical problem.

The company, which boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its platforms including WhatsApp and Threads, also encountered issues with the application programming interface (API) for WhatsApp Business. However, Downdetector suggests that the disruptions for WhatsApp and Threads were far less widespread. Additionally, several Meta employees reported being unable to access their internal work systems, leading them to believe they might have been laid off.