Why all the social media crashes?
It was a pretty bad week for social media sites across the board. Nearly every big-name social media platform experienced an outage over the past five days (well, except for one, which we’ll get to in a bit).
Perhaps worse than the downtime, though, were the conspiracy theories speculating that these outages were connected to major events in American politics.
First, you had Super Tuesday, the largest grouping of presidential primary elections in the United States in a single day, which is when Meta-owned sites Facebook, Instagram, and Threads went down. Then last night, former president Donald Trump’s own Truth Social platform went down during President Biden’s State of the Union address.
But what was actually behind these platform fails? Here’s what we know.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads
On Tuesday, all three of Meta’s major social platforms went down for about two hours. People reported not being able to log into their accounts in some instances, and in other instances they couldn’t refresh their feeds, much less post to them. The platforms went down around 10 a.m. ET and were working again a few hours later.
So what exactly brought Meta’s platforms to a halt on Super Tuesday? We don’t know. In a post on X/Twitter, Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, called it “a technical issue” without elaborating what the source of the technical issue was.
A day after Meta’s platforms went down, it was Microsoft’s turn. On Wednesday, the company’s professional social networking site, LinkedIn, experienced outages. The downtime lasted for around an hour and during it, users had trouble accessing their accounts via the mobile app and web browser.
LinkedIn confirmed the outage in a post on X, stating “It’s not you, it’s us.” About 45 minutes after that, the company posted that the platform was back up and running again. It did not give a reason for the downtime.
On Thursday, it was Reddit’s turn. For several hours, users reported that Reddit was slow to load or would only load intermittently. Reddit’s Status channel on X posted numerous updates that it was looking into several issues including slow load times and an increase in errors. As of the time of this writing, Reddit says most of those incidents have been resolved—without explaining what caused the issues.
Truth Social
Finally, and also on Thursday, former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform went down at the most inopportune time for the ex-president: when Trump was in the middle of posting raging replies to Biden’s live State of the Union address.
But even though thousands of people reported that Truth Social went down during Biden’s address, as Gizmodo points out, Truth Social’s status page never showed that the site was having any problems.
Finally, X (formerly Twitter)
No, X did not go down like the other major social media platforms this week. But the platform is worth mentioning here because when most of the sites above did go down, they had to turn to X to post updates about their downtimes to their followers.
And, of course, Elon Musk being Elon Musk, the X owner didn’t miss the opportunity to take shots at one of his main competitors: Meta. In a post on X on Tuesday, Musk said, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
And to kick more sand in Meta’s face, Musk followed that post with a meme mocking an earlier post from Meta’s Andy Stone about the downtime on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Fast Company has reached out to the social media platforms that went down this week for comment.
It was a pretty bad week for social media sites across the board. Nearly every big-name social media platform experienced an outage over the past five days (well, except for one, which we’ll get to in a bit).
Perhaps worse than the downtime, though, were the conspiracy theories speculating that these outages were connected to major events in American politics.
First, you had Super Tuesday, the largest grouping of presidential primary elections in the United States in a single day, which is when Meta-owned sites Facebook, Instagram, and Threads went down. Then last night, former president Donald Trump’s own Truth Social platform went down during President Biden’s State of the Union address.
But what was actually behind these platform fails? Here’s what we know.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads
On Tuesday, all three of Meta’s major social platforms went down for about two hours. People reported not being able to log into their accounts in some instances, and in other instances they couldn’t refresh their feeds, much less post to them. The platforms went down around 10 a.m. ET and were working again a few hours later.
So what exactly brought Meta’s platforms to a halt on Super Tuesday? We don’t know. In a post on X/Twitter, Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, called it “a technical issue” without elaborating what the source of the technical issue was.
A day after Meta’s platforms went down, it was Microsoft’s turn. On Wednesday, the company’s professional social networking site, LinkedIn, experienced outages. The downtime lasted for around an hour and during it, users had trouble accessing their accounts via the mobile app and web browser.
LinkedIn confirmed the outage in a post on X, stating “It’s not you, it’s us.” About 45 minutes after that, the company posted that the platform was back up and running again. It did not give a reason for the downtime.
On Thursday, it was Reddit’s turn. For several hours, users reported that Reddit was slow to load or would only load intermittently. Reddit’s Status channel on X posted numerous updates that it was looking into several issues including slow load times and an increase in errors. As of the time of this writing, Reddit says most of those incidents have been resolved—without explaining what caused the issues.
Truth Social
Finally, and also on Thursday, former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform went down at the most inopportune time for the ex-president: when Trump was in the middle of posting raging replies to Biden’s live State of the Union address.
But even though thousands of people reported that Truth Social went down during Biden’s address, as Gizmodo points out, Truth Social’s status page never showed that the site was having any problems.
Finally, X (formerly Twitter)
No, X did not go down like the other major social media platforms this week. But the platform is worth mentioning here because when most of the sites above did go down, they had to turn to X to post updates about their downtimes to their followers.
And, of course, Elon Musk being Elon Musk, the X owner didn’t miss the opportunity to take shots at one of his main competitors: Meta. In a post on X on Tuesday, Musk said, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
And to kick more sand in Meta’s face, Musk followed that post with a meme mocking an earlier post from Meta’s Andy Stone about the downtime on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Fast Company has reached out to the social media platforms that went down this week for comment.
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