Meta Experiences Outage Affecting Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp: Here's What to Know

Meta said on Friday that services on its social media apps became inaccessible as the company experienced a wide outage, affecting Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. Most users experienced the system down at around 3:30 p.m. ET on the same day.

Meta Social Media Apps Experiencing Outage

Meta Platforms noted that its social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced an outage, affecting thousands of users for more than two hours. According to a report from 9To5Mac, not everyone is affected.

However, it did appear to be a widespread outage, as almost 20,000 users said at one point that they were having trouble accessing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta immediately acknowledged the issue by saying, "We know some of you might be experiencing issues with our apps today. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience."

Instagram's support account noted that they are doing their best to return to normal as soon as possible. While the company is very apologetic about what happened with their services, many users of Meta's services complained through Twitter regarding the situation.

Below are the reactions that were tweeted regarding the outage.

Meta's Response

According to Reuters, issues with Meta's Ads Manager were also resolved. It is the advertising tool on Facebook that lets brands buy and create ads on the social media platform.

In a released statement from Meta, the company promised to resolve the problem immediately but did not provide an estimated time frame on when it would be fixed. The company said: "Our engineering teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Three hours after the problem occurred or at 6:30 p.m. ET, outage reports had come down to less than 500 based on the outage-tracking website Downdetector.

Meta has yet to reveal a cause for the problem, but the issues appeared to have improved. Facebook's parent company eventually updated its status and outages website by putting all its business products in a "resolved" green checkmark.

Previous Outages on Meta Apps

The latest Meta outages came a month after Facebook Messenger App suffered similar outages in May. At that time, 77% of the reported problems were about sending messages, while 16% complained about having difficulty receiving messages. About 7% suggest that an in-app issue caused the outage.

Last October, more than 100,000 Whatsapp users in various locations experienced an outage that lasted for two hours. It includes countries like the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Singapore.

Some BBC journalists also complained of being unable to access the application for a brief moment. But this outage was reportedly no match compared to the 2021 outage when the messaging platform was down for five hours. The reason behind this outage was the mistaken configuration in the network.