A technical issue on Tuesday caused blackout complications for several hours on social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger.
This picture taken in Moscow on October 5, 2021 shows the US online social media and social networking service Facebook's logo (R), the US instant messaging software Whatsapp's logo (L) and the US social network Instagram's logo (C) on a smartphone screen. - Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage on October 4, 2021, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
Andy Stone, Head of Communications at Meta, addressed the login problems on X, formerly known as Twitter, and said the company "resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
The Associated Press reported users were locked out of their Facebook accounts and feeds on the platform. Threads and Instagram were experiencing glitches when attempting to refresh, while WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, appeared unaffected.
A senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency disclosed that the agency was "not aware of any specific election nexus nor any specific malicious cyber activity nexus to the outage."
However, the widespread outage comes ahead of Thursday's deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act.
To comply, Meta is making changes to its platforms. For one, users will be able to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can no longer be combined to target them with online ads.
The last outage in 2021 saw Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp crash for hours. The company explained the problem was due to faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The following year, WhatsApp again experienced a brief shutdown.
