Meta cites “a technical problem” to explain the global outage of several of its platforms

An outage affected the group’s platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, for more than an hour on Tuesday. The hypothesis of a cyber attack does not seem the most likely.

For a little over an hour, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger experienced a global outage on Tuesday March 5. According to Meta officials, “This is a technical issue which has now been resolved.” This is the only answer we were able to obtain, without further details. However, on Tuesday, many believed it was a hack. Thousands of Facebook users have been logged out of their accounts. Unable to reconnect, a mess of error messages appeared.

In panic, to avoid account theft, many sought to reset their password. Except it didn’t work any better. We therefore feared the worst, while in the United States, Tuesday was “Super Tuesday”, the day when the largest number of primaries were held in the country. However, there, Facebook is widely used to call for votes. As for Instagram, it helps to register on the electoral lists. As a result, even the White House had to communicate about the outage, publishing this message: “We are aware of the incident. And at this time, we are not aware of any specific connection to the election or any particular malicious cyber activity.”

Not Meta’s first outage

If it is impossible to rule out the theory of a cyber attack, it is very unlikely. First, because the problem was resolved in a little over an hour. If it was hacking, it probably would have taken longer, if only to make sure the hacker couldn’t do it again. Then, because huge sites like Facebook or Instagram are so exposed, they have the best in terms of cybersecurity (you can imagine the glory for a hacker to manage to bring down the Facebook site ).

Moreover, this is not the first time that Meta’s services have experienced a major outage. The last one was in 2021, after a human error. It lasted almost seven hours and caused the company to lose nearly 100 million euros. This kind of problem once again proves our dependence on internet services. This is also why some are campaigning to break the vertical integration of tech giants. This would prevent when a service crashes, it takes all its little comrades with it: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Threads… The Meta galaxy is gigantic.