Elon Musk takes a dig at Meta as it suffers massive outage across platforms

As Meta suffered a massive outage on Tuesday, 4 March across its platforms, Elon Musk took a dig at Mark Zuckerberg-run services, posting a meme where X is seen as the captain leading the team of Instagram, Facebook and Threads as penguins from the 2019 animation film of the same name.

In one of the worst outages for Meta, its entire family of apps — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads — went down for millions across the globe, including in India, as users were thrown out of their accounts.

The users took to X to write about their woes, as it was the only social media platform working.

Musk also posted a meme with X leading the team of apps, along with an image of a post by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” posted Stone on X.

Musk also wrote a separate post that read: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”. Earlier in the day, the tech billionaire said that he is ready to "fight" Zuckerberg anywhere, anytime, with any rules.

There was no official announcement from Meta as to exactly what caused this massive outage across its platforms.

While Facebook logged users out of their accounts, people were unable to refresh their feeds on Instagram and stories and comments were not loading. X rival Threads also went down, displaying an error message that read, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.”

WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, still appeared to be working.

Website outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 1 lakh reports of Facebook being down, and the number was increasing. Instagram also had more than 20,000 reports of outages being faced by users across the globe.

“Instagram, Facebook and Threads are currently down,” posted software engineer Alessandro Paluzzi. “Facebook, IG & Messenger are all down. Thank god Twitter doesn’t belong to Meta,” another posted.

A similar outage happened in 2021 when a configuration issue affected Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for several hours.