Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads on Wednesday were all experiencing issues to varying degrees as a result of a global outage affecting Meta’s apps. The cause of the outage was not disclosed, but Meta acknowledged a “technical issue” in a post on X.
The company at 1:48 p.m. ET wrote, “We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Instagram posted a similar message on X, along with the hashtag #instagramdown for visibility.
WhatsApp additionally confirmed its own issues but said it was working on a solution and “starting to see a return to normal for most people,” as of 1:49 PM ET.
The outage was resolved several hours later, as Meta announced at 5:26 PM ET that it was “99%” recovered and just “doing some last checks.” Instagram said it was back in service at 6:02 PM ET and WhatsApp said the same at 6:16 PM ET.
According to anecdotal reports at the time, including user posts on X and Bluesky and downtime tracking websites like Downdetector, the outage began sometime before 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday. While typically Downdector sees an average of 16 user reports per hour regarding Facebook issues, it spiked around 1 p.m. to over 97,000 reports. Instagram, meanwhile, spiked with north of 67,000 reports.
While the website doesn’t offer actual measurements around outages, it can help to offer some visibility into who’s affected and how long outages have been ongoing.
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In addition to user reports of the outages, Meta’s status page for its business products shows some disruptions as well. This includes “major disruptions” of the Facebook Ads Manager, as well as issues with Workplace from Meta, which is currently “recovering from disruptions.” The APIs for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram are also showing “major disruptions.” Those have since been resolved.
Meta has been asked for further comment but only pointed to its public posts on X, without detailing what caused the issues.
The tech giant has had other significant outages this year, including another impacting multiple apps on Super Tuesday in March in the U.S., and one impacting WhatsApp and, to some extent, other apps in April.
Updated after publication with information about the outage’s resolution.
