Elon Musk has tweeted two posts mocking the ongoing outages across Meta's suite of social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger
Billionaire Musk has teased Meta over its global outage
Elon Musk has taunted Meta over its global outage, which left billions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads users unable to access the social networks. Of Meta's services, only WhatsApp managed to stay online.
Hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Facebook and Instagram users flooded X, formerly known as Twitter, to complain about the outage, search for a workaround, or check if others were also experiencing the issues.
In response, Elon Musk tweeted: "If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working"
If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
There's no love lost between the two billionaire CEOs running X and Meta.
Elon Musk has previously challenged martial arts-loving Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook and continues to run parent company Meta, to a "cage match" fight. The brawl would be overseen by UFC president Dana White, with Elon Musk boasting that he'd found “an epic location” in Italy.
But despite this level of preparation, the billionaire battle was eventually called off.
Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg revealed late last year that his social media rival “won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead.” He teased Elon Musk in a series of posts on Threads, which was launched to rival X, writing: “If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.”
Taking advantage of the ongoing misery caused by the outage across Meta's line-up of products, Elon Musk posted a meme that portrays his social network as superior. The 52-year-old entrepreneur shared a screenshot of the anthropomorphised penguins from DreamWorks' Madagascar bearing the logos of Mark Zuckberg's biggest social networks — Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — as they salute another penguin dressed as a military general with the X logo on his chest.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
In case there was any doubt about what event multi-billionaire Musk was referencing, the meme also contains a screenshot of the tweet from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. The post confirmed the company was aware of the issues and investigating a fix for the outage.
"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," the Meta communications executive had shared earlier on Elon Musk's competing platform.
Elon Musk, who started his career at PayPal, became the richest person on the planet after successful stints running SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Tesla. He remains CEO at all of these companies.
In October 2022, Musk completed his $44 billion deal to own Twitter. Since then, Musk has rebranded the social network to X — a company name that he originally intended to use at PayPal back in the 90s — and launched several paid subscription plans and courted some of the biggest YouTube creators, including Mr. Beast, away from the Google-owned video sharing website to his platform.
Earlier today, hundreds of thousands of social media users started to report serious issues accessing social media platforms Instagram and Facebook amid what appeared to be a global outage.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, to report issues with Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads.
More than 300,000 reports of outages on Facebook were made between about 3.20pm and 4pm, while Instagram users flagged more than 120,000 outages on the site at about the same time.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Users reported being logged out of their Facebook and Facebook Messenger accounts, while others indicated the applications or websites would not load as normal.
Andy Stone, Meta’s head of communications, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the problem had been resolved, and that it had been caused by a “technical issue”.
He wrote: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
