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All of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads – went down on Wednesday in a major outage that affected users around the world.
The company’s systems suffered a major technical issue at around 6pm UK time, or 10 am local pacific time, according to tracking website Down Detector. Problems were widespread across markets, the site showed.
Meta does not run official status pages for its user-facing apps. But it acknowledged the issues on some of its official accounts.
“Hi, we know there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram,” it wrote on the official Instagram page on X/Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience.”
WhatsApp’s official page posted much the same status, saying it was “aware of some issues accessing” the app.
“We’re actively working on a solution and starting to see a return to normal for most people. We expect things to be back to normal shortly.”
But they appeared to quickly recover at least partially and most of the company’s apps appeared to be functioning as normal within the hour.
Early on Thursday, Meta confirmed on X that it is “99 per cent of the way” to resolving the issue with only “some last checks” pending.
“We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” the company said.
WhatsApp and Instagram appeared to be back and functioning normally.
“We’re back, happy chatting!” WhatsApp said on its official X account.
“Andddd we’re back – sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us,” Instagram said.
Some accounts reported problems with specific parts of certain apps after the outage. While Meta runs its various apps as largely separate systems, they do share technical underpinnings that mean that large outages at the company tend to take them all down at the same time. As such, Meta outages can quickly take down apps that are individually used by hundreds of millions of people each day.
In the past, Meta has spoken about bringing those apps more closely together, so that they are interoperable and users can for instance message between them. But it appears to have walked back that plan, apparently in the face of regulatory pressure.
