Earlier this morning – roughly 10 a.m. EST – people actively online in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Bosnia and elsewhere began reporting what boiled down to the same basic message:

“Uh, is all of Meta down?”

Indeed, that seemed to be the case.

Axios, Reuters, The Verge, CNN, The Independent, TechCrunch – news outlets galore flocked together and individual users swiftly sprang to the forums (mainly the DownDetector comments section) to chime in regarding this major Meta service outage. I even sat on a call with our editorial team as we kept tabs; 300,000 total reports, 460,000, and so on. We mostly noted across-the-board login-related issues, but the issue seemed to be plaguing general app and website access, too; users received a “Something went wrong…” error message or “Try again later,” but that too seemed futile as failed logins (even with the right passwords) persisted.

Having said all this, a huge Meta services hiccough isn’t what we’d usually dedicate immediate coverage to. So, why are you currently part-way through this article covering it?

It’s simple; one word, in fact:

Impacts.

It’s quite unusual for Meta to be experiencing an outage of this size, given the size and scale of its network (and the built-in redundancies, to boot). Meta-owned platforms like Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads are daily go-tos for people around the world for news, particularly in the U.S. (while also acknowledging the fact that today is Super Tuesday for Americans, which has stirred the conspiracy theory cauldron for many folks). Even Meta Quest headsets were automatically signed out, snaring metaverse functionalities as well. Meta leaders were even resorting to X (formerly Twitter) to report the troubles being experienced. (Cue more Zuckerberg/Musk memes, we suppose.)

Thus, impacts to where and how people read the headlines.

There are additional impacts to consider a.) for businesses’ clicks and ad views on Meta apps, and b.) regarding potential cybersecurity-related woes being tossed out there, and it may not be the worst idea in the world to reset your password and ensure 2FA is set up. (Though Meta has since noted this is a server issue, not a hack or a larger, looming cyber attack.)

Overall, the outage occurred at an all-around inopportune time; global users sent into flurries of irregular outrage, businesses citing issues, and even U.S. candidates and political organizations being halted as they conduct last-minute voter outreach. The fact is, Meta permeates near-countless societal functions in 2024, but that’s a conversation for another day.

In the meantime, we’ll continue observing how this plays out.