Facebook, Instagram Outages a Sign of the Times

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users were hit with outages yesterday. The outages started late morning East Coast time, and services were restored by mid-afternoon. The outages came at a time of great anxiety. Between the war in the Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, and the U.S. Super Tuesday elections, initial thoughts were that the incident might be due to a cyber attack.

In fact, several malicious actor groups claimed responsibility for the outages. And some conservative politicians and groups believed the outages were designed to hurt former President Trump and disrupt Super Tuesday voting. Trump loyalist Roger Stone contended on Truth Social that it was convenient "two of the most powerful communication tools for grassroots politics in America suddenly stop working on #SuperTuesday, while all of Haley’s ads in print, radio, and television remain intact.”

Fortunately, the source of the outages appears to have been a “configuration error,” according to Meta spokesman Andy Stone in a post. Everything seemed to be back to normal within about two hours.

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