On March 5th, 2024, Meta’s social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, stopped working worldwide for hours due to a big problem. This surprised many people and caused a lot of trouble and the company lost a lot of money too. At first, Meta’s share price fell by 1.5%, then it dropped even more to 1.6%.
Reports of issues began flooding in around 10 a.m. ET, leaving many users abruptly logged out of Facebook and encountering difficulties accessing Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Andy Stone, representing Meta, reassured users on X that solutions were underway and issued a statement promising a swift resolution, expressing apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Afterward, specialists talked about how much money Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, lost because of the problem. Dan Ives, who manages Wedbush Securities, said Zuckerberg lost about $100 million in earnings while the sites were down. This shows that the problem affected both the company and its leader a lot.
The outage’s cause mirrored technical glitches experienced in 2021, albeit with a faster resolution time of two hours compared to the previous seven-hour ordeal. A Facebook insider disclosed to DailyMail.com that internal systems were down, with Meta’s service dashboard indicating “major disruptions” across multiple services.
Speculation arose regarding the outage’s timing, occurring just before the European Union’s deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the new Digital Markets Act (DMA). It’s been suggested that Meta’s efforts to comply with the DMA, possibly by implementing changes such as allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts, may have led to coding errors triggering the outage. However, the exact connection between the outage and Meta’s preparations for the DMA remains uncertain.
The March 5th outage underscored the vulnerability of relying on centralized social media platforms and highlighted the potential repercussions of regulatory compliance efforts for tech giants like Meta.
