Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described his company’s mission as “making the world more open and connected.” However, on March 5th (US time), the opposite happened. Nearly all of Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger, suffered widespread outages around the world for about two hours.
Some people were suddenly logged out of Facebook and Messenger, and Instagram stopped loading new content starting around 10 a.m. ET (midnight Japan time on the 6th).
“We recognize that people are not able to access our services,” Meta communications director Andy Stone told X at the time.Posting. “We are working on a solution.”
A spokesperson for Meta then revealed in an interview that there had been a new post by Stone. “(Meta) resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected. We apologize for any inconvenience,” Stone wrote about two hours later.Posted on X。
The outage appeared to last for about two hours before Meta’s platform gradually came back online for some users. According to network monitoring service ThousandEyes, Meta’s web server was accessible just after 11:30 a.m. ET (1:30 a.m. Japan time on the 6th).However, some users continued to receive an error when attempting to log in, which suggests that the cause may be an issue with backend services such as authentication.Pointed out with X。
After this, the meta says “problem resolved”Post to ThreadsIt was close to 1:00 pm Eastern time (3:00 am Japan time on the 6th).
Multiple hacker groups are responsible for the occurrence of the failure.claims to be involved. However, if we look back at history, it is extremely rare for this type of service interruption to be the work of extremely malicious people.In fact, on Facebook and Instagram in 2021massive failureThis is happening, but in this case it was caused by a router update.
The latest outage coincided with Americans heading out to vote on Super Tuesday, when primary elections are held in 15 states across the country. While political ad spending is still overwhelmingly targeted at traditional media (primarily television), Insider Intelligence estimates that more than 28% of political ad spending in 2024 will go to digital platforms, with the meta It will receive about 4.5% of the total spending, which is expected to be $12.32 billion (approximately 1.8 trillion yen).
（WIRED US/Translation by Daisuke Takimoto）
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