Meta Platforms’ social media applications, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Twitter-rival Threads, swiftly bounced back after a temporary disruption that impacted thousands of users on Monday, as per Downdetector.com.
During the peak of the outage, which lasted for over an hour, more than 14,000 users encountered difficulties accessing Instagram. Additionally, around 7,000 users experienced issues with Facebook, while approximately 2,700 users faced challenges with WhatsApp.
Threads, Meta’s latest offering, also suffered a brief outage, with roughly 470 users reporting difficulties accessing the app. Downdetector gathers outage information by aggregating status reports from various sources, including user-submitted errors. It’s possible that the actual number of affected users was higher. Reuters reached out to Meta for comment on the outages, but there was no immediate response.
In other news, Meta revealed its intention to introduce labels for government-affiliated accounts on Threads, the company’s newly launched Twitter-like platform. During an Australian inquiry on foreign interference, Josh Machin, Meta’s head of public policy for Australia, stated, “Areas such as labels for state-affiliated media and fact-checking are all areas where we see a lot of value, and it’s our aspiration to build that out expeditiously.”
This disclosure comes shortly after the introduction of Threads, which is widely perceived as a rival to the microblogging site Twitter. Since being taken private by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter has removed tags from government-affiliated accounts, leading to criticism over the potential impact on users’ media literacy.
When asked about tagging Russian state-affiliated broadcaster RT or the Chinese government-affiliated publisher Xinhua News Agency on Threads, Machin responded, “that’s our aspiration.” He further clarified that if any state-affiliated media violated their policies, they would be removed. Expanding the functionality of tags is a top priority for Meta as they continue to develop the product.
It’s worth noting that Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms already feature tags on RT and Xinhua accounts, indicating that they are state-controlled media from Russia and China, respectively.