Date: January 30–31, 2026 Duration: ~18 hours Severity: Major
Buffer users were unable to publish image-only posts to Threads for approximately 18 hours. Text-only and video posts were unaffected throughout the incident. The root cause was an issue on Threads' side, which they acknowledged and resolved.
This was a third-party issue caused by a problem on Threads' (Meta's) platform. Threads was returning errors for image publishing requests, and the same failure was reproducible on other social media scheduling tools, confirming the issue was not specific to Buffer.
Customers attempting to publish image-only posts to Threads received an error and were unable to do so for the duration of the incident. Text-only and video posts to Threads continued to work normally throughout.
Our monitoring systems detected the issue and alerted our team before any customer reports came in. We investigated and quickly confirmed — through internal testing and by verifying the same failure occurred on other platforms — that the problem was on Threads' side.
We published a status page update to keep customers informed, and contacted Threads directly to report the issue. Threads acknowledged the problem and deployed a fix on their end. We continued monitoring and confirmed full recovery once success rates and error metrics returned to normal.
Our monitoring detected this third-party issue before customers reported it, which allowed us to respond quickly and communicate proactively.
There was a notable delay between Threads deploying their fix and our systems fully recovering — we continued to monitor carefully rather than declaring resolution too early.
Threads updated their own status page several hours after we had already identified and published our own status update, which underscores the value of maintaining our own independent monitoring and communication channels.
