Facebook, Instagram will go down on Super Tuesday, taking the price of Meta Stock with them

Meta's (Meta) stock price fell sharply following the start of the trading day in the United States on March 5 for Facebook, Instagram and other Meta applications.

The timing of the service failure could not have been worse. March 5 is commonly known as Super Tuesday in the United States: the Republican Party is holding 13 primaries and two caucuses, while the Democratic Party is holding 14 primaries and caucuses in American Samoa. Meta social media can expect high usage on the day.

Reports of Facebook and Instagram downing started appearing around 3:00 PM UTC or around 10:00 PM. According to Downdetector, there were about 498,000 Facebook outage reports, peaking at 3:38 pm UTC, and dropping to 28,000 at 4:53 pm UTC.

According to Meta's website Metastatus, four of the six developer platforms have crashed, including several business tools including Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite and Meta Admin Center.

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Meta Communications Director Andy Stone said on X (formerly Twitter) at 3:52 pm UTC that the company is aware of the access issues and is working to restore service. Half an hour later he indicated that the problem had been resolved and apologized for the inconvenience.

“A technical issue today caused people to have trouble accessing some of our services. We have resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone affected. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Stone did not provide an explanation for the termination.

The timing was bad for Meta's stock price. Meta stock closed at $502.30 on March 1, and reached an all-time high of $504.42 on March 4. At the time of writing, Meta shares are trading at $492.99, down 5.3%.

Tech stocks were generally lower on the day. The FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet and Google) all saw quotes of nearly 3% for Apple and Netflix to less than 1% for Google.

The last major Facebook and Instagram outage was on October 4, 2021, when they were down for six hours.

Other social media outlets, including YouTube and X, reportedly experienced problems on March 5. At 5:50 PM UTC, Facebook was down, but Instagram was back on the West Coast of the United States. Metastatus lists all affected products as “Recovering from Issue”.

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