On Wednesday, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads were all facing varying degrees of issues as a result of the global outage that affected Meta's apps. The cause of the outage is still unknown, but Meta acknowledged “technical issues” in a post on X.
“We're aware that technical issues are impacting the ability of some users to access our apps. We're working hard to get things back to normal as soon as possible,” the company said in a statement at 1:48 p.m. ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Instagram posted a similar message to X, prominently using the hashtag #instagramdown.
WhatsApp further acknowledged its issues, but said as of 1:49 p.m. ET that it was working on a solution and that “we are starting to get back to normal for most people.”
Anecdotally, including user posts on X and Bluesky and downtime tracking websites like Downdetector, the outage began around 1pm ET on Wednesday. Typically, Downdector receives an average of 16 user reports per hour about Facebook issues, but around 1 p.m., the number of reports spiked to more than 97,000. Meanwhile, the number of reports on Instagram skyrocketed to more than 67,000.
Although this website does not provide actual metrics on outages, it can help give you some idea of who is affected and how long the outage has been going on.
In addition to user reports of outages, Meta's business product status page also shows some confusion. This includes a “massive outage” in Facebook Ads Manager and an issue with Workplace from Meta, which is currently “recovering from an outage.” Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram's APIs are also experiencing “major disruptions.”
Mr Mehta has been approached for further comment.
The tech giant has had other significant outages this year, including an outage that affected multiple apps on Super Tuesday in March in the U.S., and an outage that affected WhatsApp and, to some extent, other apps in April. It also includes failures that affected the app.