Meta Shares Plunge Following Massive Outage on Facebook and Instagram on Super Tuesday
Summary:
Meta (META) experienced a significant share price drop after a large-scale outage affected Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta apps on Super Tuesday (March 5. during the U.S. primary elections). Issues were reported around 3:00 pm UTC, peaking at nearly 500,000 outage reports. According to Meta's website Metastatus, several business tools were affected. While the problem was resolved and an apology issued by Meta's communications director, the cause of the outage wasn't disclosed. The outage led to a 5.3% drop in Meta's shares, and other tech stocks also trended downwards.
The highest-ever share price of Meta (META) saw a significant drop following a huge disruption to the services of Facebook, Instagram and other Meta-owned apps at the start of business hours in America on March 5. The timing of the technological glitches was extremely inconvenient as they occurred on Super Tuesday, a day in the U.S where various Republican Party primary elections and caucuses, as well as Democratic Party primaries and a caucus in American Samoa, took place, situations that would typically result in high usage of Meta’s social media platforms.
Issues with the Facebook and Instagram platforms were first reported around 3:00 pm UTC, or 10:00 am ET. Downdetector indicated it had received almost 498,000 outage reports at Facebook's peak time of 3:38 pm UTC, which dropped down to 28,000 by 4:53 pm UTC.
The website Metastatus, belonging to Meta, indicated that various business tools had been affected. Tools like Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite and Meta Admin Center experienced disruptions, in addition to four out of six of its developer platforms.
Following the blackout, Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, sent out a message on X (previously known as Twitter) at 3:52 pm UTC, stating that the company was aware of the access-related issues, and was taking steps to restore services. Half an hour later he posted another message indicating that the issue had been dealt with and apologized for the disruption. However, the cause of the outage was not offered.
The share price of Meta also had a bad run due to the outage. After closing at $502.30 on March 1, Meta stock had risen to an all-time high of $504.42 by March 4. At the time this article was written, Meta shares had dropped to $492.99, a 5.3% decline. There was an overall decrease in tech stock on the day, with falls in FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet and Google) prices varying from close to 3% for Apple and Netflix, to just under 1% for Google.
This is not the first time that such an issue has plagued Facebook and Instagram. A similar outage occurred on October 4, 2021, when both platforms were inaccessible for a six-hour period.
Other social media platforms such as YouTube and X also reportedly experienced technical problems on March 5. Facebook was still inaccessible as of 5:50 pm UTC, while Instagram services had been restored on the U.S. West Coast. Metastatus was still reporting all affected products as 'recovering from disruptions' at that time.
Published At
3/5/2024 9:49:26 PM
Disclaimer: Algoine does not endorse any content or product on this page. Readers should conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the asset, company, or any information in this article and assume full responsibility for their decisions. This article should not be considered as investment advice. Our news is prepared with AI support.
Do you suspect this content may be misleading, incomplete, or inappropriate in any way, requiring modification or removal?
We appreciate your report.