Menlo Park, California – Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, faced technical difficulties on Wednesday afternoon as thousands of users reported outages for the apps on DownDetector. However, Meta announced that the issue was nearly resolved just after 5:30 p.m. EST.
The reports of outages began around 12:30 p.m. EST, with over 100,000 Facebook users encountering problems and documenting them on DownDetector by 1:10 p.m. EST. Similarly, tens of thousands of Instagram users and users of WhatsApp and Threads also reported issues during this time.
By late afternoon, the number of reported outages on Facebook had significantly decreased, with Instagram reports falling as well. The Meta status page for its business products indicated widespread disruptions for various tools and platforms, including Facebook Ads Manager and Messenger.
In a post on X, Meta expressed gratitude to users for their patience and stated that they were close to resolving the issue, with just some final checks left to be done. The company apologized to those affected by the outage.
This recent outage adds to Meta’s history of technical difficulties, including a global outage in March that impacted hundreds of thousands of users. The previous outage lasted more than two hours and was attributed to a technical issue, resulting in significant disruptions to Facebook and Instagram.
Meta’s situation is not unique, as other tech companies like Microsoft and Reddit have also experienced recent outages. These incidents highlight the challenges that large internet platforms face in maintaining stable services for their users.
With Meta’s prominence as one of the world’s largest public companies, valued at over $1 trillion, these technical disruptions underscore the importance of robust infrastructure and contingency plans to minimize service interruptions for users worldwide.