Widespread outages hitting Facebook, Instagram and Threads Tuesday blocked users from logging into their accounts — and caused a flood of conspiracy theories that Meta was being used to weaken Donald Trump on Super Tuesday.
The site DownDetector, which tracks outages on social media platforms, said that more than 300,000 people reported Facebook being down on Tuesday morning. A Meta spokesman confirmed the outage.
It hit as voters in 16 states and one U.S. territory headed to the polls to cast ballots in presidential primaries. And many on social media, most identifying as conservatives and supporters of Trump, believed the outages were no coincidence.
One of those pushing the conspiracy theory is the conservative-leaning media watchdog group Media Research Center, which made a post to X saying the outages sound like "election interference to us."
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Conservative commentator Rogan O'Handley also thought something shady was afoot.
"What a coincidence that Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube are down on Super Tuesday. Practice run for November?" he wrote in a post to X.
Dozens of other posts across the platform drew the same conclusion — that the outages were a plot to stop the voting.
Also pushing the unproven claim was Trump ally Roger Stone, who took to Truth Social and said that "two of the most powerful communication tools for grassroots politics in America ... suddenly stop working on [SuperTuesday], while all of Haley’s ads in print, radio, and television remain intact."
Within a matter of hours after the speculation started to circulate, Meta's platforms were back online.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” said Andy Stone, a communications representative for Meta. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
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