Facebook, Instagram go down on Super Tuesday, take Meta stock price with them
Meta’s (META) record-high share price tumbled after a massive outage hit Facebook, Instagram and other Meta apps as the business day began in the United States on March 5.
The timing of the service failure could hardly be worse. March 5 is commonly known as Super Tuesday in the United States, as the Republican Party is holding 13 primary elections and two caucuses, and the Democratic Party is holding 14 primaries and a caucus in American Samoa. Meta’s social media could expect intensive usage on the day.
Reports that Facebook and Instagram were down began to appear around 3:00 pm UTC, or 10:00 am ET. According to Downdetector, nearly 498,000 reports were received of Facebook outages, peaking at 3:38 pm UTC, declining to 28,000 by 4:53 pm UTC.
According to Meta’s website Metastatus, several business tools, including Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite and Meta Admin Center were down, along with four of its six developer platforms.
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Meta communications director Andy Stone posted a message on X (formerly Twitter) at 3:52 pm UTC saying the company was aware of the access issues and was working on restoring service. He posted another message half an hour later implying the problem was resolved and apologizing for the inconvenience:
"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Stone did not provide an explanation of the outage.
The timing was bad for Meta’s share price. Meta stock closed at $502.30 on March 1, and reached $504,42 on March 4, which was an all-time high. At the time of writing, Meta shares are trading for $492.99, down 5.3%.
Tech stocks were down overall on the day. The FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet and Google) all saw falling quotes, ranging from close to 3% for Apple and Netflix to less than 1% for Google.
The last major outage of Facebook and Instagram was on Oct. 4, 2021, when they were down for six hours.
Other social media, including YouTube and X, reportedly experienced glitches on March 5. At 5:50 pm UTC, Facebook remained down but Instagram had been restored on the West Coast of the United States. Metastatus lists all affected products as “recovering from disruptions.”
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