All four social platforms were not working on Wednesday. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube all suffered outages around the same time and lost access to basic functions.
Reports of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube All Suffer Outages
Social media is filled with complaints.
The first reports came from Twitter, where users revealed getting a message informing them that they had reached their “Tweet limit” for the entire day. Twitter does have a tweet limit (it’s 2,400 tweets each day), which the platform claims it uses to relieve strain on the server.
However, most users don’t tweet that frequently, and many of those who saw the message said they hadn’t even posted on Twitter that day.
NetBlocks, a watchdog company that tracks web outages around the world, confirmed that Twitter was experiencing “international outages” that were affecting some of its features.
ℹ️ Note: Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting website, mobile app and features including posting and retweeting; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/3OmR99Uy76
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) February 8, 2023
Surprisingly, an almost similar glitch appeared to strike Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday. And users reported that they were unable to post new Instagram stories or reach Facebook Messenger.
Downdetector, which monitors individual complaints for web platforms, detected a significant rise in incident reports for both social media channels around 4:30 p.m. EST, around the same time Twitter began experiencing issues.
One user posted, “There was a problem with the server [429]. Is anyone facing the same issue while using YouTube?”
While another wrote, “Twitter not working properly plus YouTube server down… what’s going tonight?”
Reason for outage: unknown
Twitter’s support page promptly responded to the complaints. But they did not provide the reason for the outage in their short statement apologizing for the inconvenience: “Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed.”
hi, we've seen reports that YouTube homepage is down for some of you 🫠 we're looking into it rn, really sorry if you’re experiencing this
we’ll follow up with more soon, thx for your patience 💕
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2023
Twitter has even been filled with memes, jokes, and conspiracy theories about what went down. After all, waking up to see all the web’s biggest platforms were all having issues simultaneously is a cause for concern.
There are numerous causes for social media outages, but glitches are the most common. Even updating the internet infrastructure used to align internet traffic to the data centre can cause social media platforms to go offline. Moreover, cyber-attacks and malicious intervention in social media platforms are other causes of such outages.
