Why did Facebook go down? A visual exploration of the major Meta outage

Nearly 2.4 million Facebook users around the globe reported problems with the social media site at 10:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, a loss of access that started about 30 minutes earlier and rapidly accelerated.

Downdetector by Ookla, a network intelligence company that tracks internet connectivity, said it logged reports from more than 1.8 million users across the U.S. as of noon.

Meta, the owner and operator of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other affected sites, said a technical issue caused the problems.

Read more: LinkedIn site goes down.

Many users reported being logged out of Facebook accounts with no ability to log back in. Service was mostly restored by 1 p.m., though some users noted lingering problems.

The problems appeared on Super Tuesday, an election day where 15 states and one territory hold primary elections and caucuses for the next presidential election.

Facebook users who tried to log in received a message that said, "Session expired, please log in again."

When they tried to log in, they received another message, "the password you've entered is incorrect." Other site users received similar messages.

When did outages happen?

Downdetector said most of the problems were the inability to log into Facebook.

What problems did most Facebook users encounter?

Facebook has experienced access problems in the past. Users lost access for hours in 2021, a network problem that Facebook said happened during a maintenance operation.

Which US cities had the most access problems?

Other outages were reported in the U.K., Germany, Argentina and Japan, the New York Times reported.

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CONTRIBUTING Jonathan Limehouse, Paste BN

SOURCE Paste BN Network reporting and research; downdetector.com; The Associated Press