Facebook and Instagram, the Meta platforms, experience extensive disruptions.

Login attempts are rejected and feeds freeze as Google’s platform encounters login issues as well.

On Tuesday, Facebook and Instagram encountered significant global issues, with users facing login rejections and feed disruptions. The outages were initially reported around 3:30 pm GMT (10:30 am EST, 2:30 am AEDT) and gradually improved by approximately 5 pm.

Meta addressed the problem via a statement on its latest social platform, Threads, shortly after 7 pm GMT, stating, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused difficulties accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue promptly and apologize for any inconvenience.”

According to the company, the primary issue revolved around Facebook logins, with Threads also experiencing downtime during the disruption.

The White House acknowledged the outage, which coincided with Super Tuesday, a crucial day for presidential primary elections in the United States. A senior official from the US cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency mentioned during a press briefing, “We are aware of the incident, and currently, there is no evidence linking it to any election interference or malicious cyber activity.”

Remarkably, the disruptions aligned with login issues on Google’s platform, implying a potential shared cause behind the outages affecting two prominent tech conglomerates that predominantly manage their own infrastructure.

Meta’s business status page indicated several disruptions, notably “major disruptions” within the group’s admin center and Facebook login service, which enables users to access third-party services using their Facebook credentials. Consequently, some users reported outages across various other platforms.

By 4 pm GMT, Meta updated its entire status page, marking the status as “unknown” for all services except the Messenger API for Instagram. Certain Meta services, such as WhatsApp and the Facebook ads transparency page, appeared to remain operational. However, by 4:15 pm, the Meta status page itself ceased functioning.

In his first post on X in a week, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged the issue, stating, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are actively addressing this.”

The current outages are unlikely to reach the severity level experienced during Facebook’s 2021 outage. In that incident, a configuration error in a lesser-known protocol known as BGP resulted in the inadvertent removal of the company’s own address from the systems facilitating communication between servers on the internet.

Although the error was quickly identified, implementing the fix took several hours. This delay was partly due to the inability of the company’s engineers to remotely access their servers to address the issue. Additionally, they were unable to utilize their corporate passes to bypass electronic locks and gain physical access to the servers.