Election officials in multiple jurisdictions told PolitiFact the March 5 Meta outages outages did not affect voting.
It’s Election Day in November 2024. Across the U.S., voters are heading to the polls. And major social media platforms are not working.
The scenario could alarm voters and draw news organizations’ attention. But would it affect voting?
A similar incident played out March 5, when Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Threads stopped working worldwide for about two hours. The outages happened on Super Tuesday, when voters in 16 states and one territory were casting their ballots in the presidential primary.
DownDetector, a website that tracks outages using methods including user-submitted reports, said that more than 500,000 Facebook outages and 79,000 Instagram outages were reported around 10:30 a.m Eastern Time.
