On Tuesday, a technical issue caused widespread login problems for users across Meta's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger. Andy Stone, Meta's head of communications, took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to acknowledge the issues and stated that the company had resolved the problem as quickly as possible, apologizing for any inconvenience caused.

Users reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts, with feeds not refreshing on both Facebook and Instagram. However, WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, appeared to be unaffected by the outage. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stated that they were not aware of any specific election or malicious cyberactivity nexus to the outage.

The outage occurred just before the deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act. Meta is making changes to comply with the regulations, such as allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts to prevent personal information from being combined for targeted ads. It is unclear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta may be making for the DMA.

This outage is not the first for Meta's platforms, as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a lengthy outage in 2021 due to faulty changes on routers coordinating network traffic between data centers. WhatsApp also had a brief outage the following year.

Downdetector reported that as many as 500,000 Facebook users experienced login issues on Tuesday, with around 50,000 reports for Instagram and 10,000 for Facebook Messenger. The number of reports began to decrease within an hour of the outage starting. Meta's status page showed "major disruptions" affecting Facebook login and other areas of the platform.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone assured users that they were working on the issue. Major platform outages are rare but are typically caused by benign issues, such as software updates. Meta has not provided a reason for Tuesday's outage. The recent AT&T network outage has heightened concerns about service disruptions among consumers.