Instagram, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, Discord Down for Users Worldwide

Facebook users faced the biggest disruption, but things appeared to be largely resolved within two hours.

Meta’s social media sites all went down for many users on Tuesday night, and multiple sources online reported that YouTube and Discord were also experiencing disruptions. The timing coincided with the “Super Tuesday” presidential primary election event in the United States.  

Over half a million people were affected by the issues with Facebook alone, which began occurring at around 8:30pm IST on Tuesday, (7am in US Pacific Time), according to Downdetector.com. Meta's communications staff also posted on X, stating the company had identified an issue impacting its login mechanisms. Meanwhile, users erupted with complaints, posting on other social media and on support forums that they had been locked out of their accounts. Fewer Instagram users seemed to be affected, though the number was still significant. The issue seemed to be global, with several people even in India unable to access Instagram over two hours later. Some users of Meta’s other services, Threads and Messenger, also seemed to be experiencing issues.

Many Facebook users reported being forced to sign in again, but being unable to do so even when using the correct credentials. Others were shown an error message reading “Something went wrong”, with feeds just not loading or refreshing. 

Meanwhile, Google confirmed that YouTube users were unable to load videos in a tweet thanking them for reporting the issue. Discord, the gamer-focused real-time social platform, was also down for about an hour. The company’s own status page identified the issue as being related to an update it had rolled out. 

The mass outages are not currently thought to be the result of a global service provider outage or any foul play, but investigations are ongoing. However, conspiracy theories are also spreading, mainly because of the scale of the situation, the fact that these companies have massive global redundancy capacity, and the timing coinciding with Super Tuesday.

Not missing the opportunity to take a jab at their competitors, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and owner Elon Musk posted memes and reminders that their own infrastructure was functioning smoothly.