London, England – WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram experienced a brief outage on Wednesday due to technical difficulties at parent company Meta.
Thousands of users faced issues accessing the popular social media platforms, leading to frustration expressed on other platforms. Fortunately, Meta’s status site indicated that most problems were resolved, although the company has yet to provide a formal comment on the issue.
The outage began around 6:00 PM BST (2:00 PM EST) on Wednesday. UK-based Downdetector reported approximately 82,000 problems with WhatsApp at 6:25 PM, but by an hour later, the majority of the issues had been resolved. Instagram users reported around 3,700 outages at 6:20 PM, with some disruptions persisting for a couple of hours. Similarly, Facebook users reported issues at the same time, with 1,840 outages noted at 6:23 PM.
The technical difficulties were not limited to the UK, as around 5,000 individuals in the United States encountered Instagram issues. At its peak, roughly 24,000 WhatsApp users also experienced problems. WhatsApp acknowledged the issues in a post on X platform, stating, “We are aware that some users are facing difficulties and are working to resolve the situation as soon as possible.”
According to Downdetector, nearly 3,500 users in India and over 7,000 in Brazil also reported problems with the platforms. Meta, with approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, including Threads, continues to be a dominant presence in the social media landscape.