Meta Experiences Widespread Outages on Super Tuesday
As voters across 15 states headed to the polls for Super Tuesday primaries, meta.com/”>Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, faced significant disruptions to its services. The outages occurred at a critical time when political ad spending on digital platforms is expected to reach new heights.
History of Meta’s Outages
This is not the first time Meta has encountered major technical issues. In 2021, Facebook and Instagram suffered another massive outage due to an update to the company’s routers. While several hacker groups have claimed responsibility for past incidents, the company has not confirmed these allegations.
Political Ad Spending on Digital Platforms
Although traditional media, particularly television, still dominates political ad spending, digital platforms are gaining ground. A report from Insider Intelligence found that more than 28 percent of the projected $12.32 billion in political ad spending for 2024 is expected to go toward digital platforms, with Meta receiving approximately 4.5 percent of the total.
Update on WhatsApp
Updated 3/5/2024, 2:35 pm EST: Despite reports of WhatsApp outages, the company has stated that it found “no widespread issues” with the messaging service. We have updated the article to remove WhatsApp from the list of Meta services impacted by the broader disruption.
4 Comments
Phew, time to flood the feeds with “Did you miss me?” selfies, right
Looks like our digital lifeboats have come back; let’s not get too cozy, though.
Back online? Time to scroll endlessly again!
Oh boy, who’s ready to dive back into the never-ending social media abyss