It was a night of frustration for many social media users, but also an opportunity for some playful mockery from Elon Musk. Facebook, Instagram and even Meta’s new Threads app all experienced major outages Tuesday evening, leaving thousands unable to access the platforms.
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Meta’s Moment of Humiliation
As reports of the issues piled up, with over 14,800 Instagram outages and 12,100 for Facebook logged on Downdetector, Musk took to his X platform (formerly Twitter) to poke fun at his rival tech giant.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” the billionaire quipped in a cheeky reference to X remaining operational. He then doubled down by sharing a meme depicting penguins with Meta app logos saluting a penguin branded with the X logo.
The outage problems were widespread, with Facebook users locked out of their accounts entirely while Instagram fans found their feeds refusing to refresh with new content. Threads, Meta’s answer to X, also ran into trouble with an error message frequently popping up.
As the issues persisted for around an hour, netizens turned to X and other platforms to share jokes and memes about being Cut off from Zuckerberg’s apps. Meta’s communications team confirmed they were aware of people “having trouble accessing our platforms.”
While temporary outages are common even for tech giants, they highlight our heavy reliance on these social media services in today’s world. And for Musk, it provided prime opportunity to revel in his platform’s uptime at Meta’s expense through some lighthearted trolling.
The issues eventually appeared to be resolved in the late evening hours as services were restored. But not before Musk and others got in a few laughs during the downtime disruption.
