According to outage tracking service DownDetector, users reported problems accessing several of Meta's social media apps on Wednesday, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger.
According to DownDetector, reports of power outages from cities across the US began around 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Facebook and Instagram users said they were having difficulty accessing apps and websites, while Messenger users said they were having problems logging into the service and sending messages.
A Meta spokesperson previously told CBS News, “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.” Afternoon.
A few hours later, at 5:26 pm Eastern Time, Meta announced it was close to fixing the problem.
“Thanks for sticking with us! We're 99% of the way – just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who have been impacted by the outage,” the company posted on its account on Twitter.
At the peak of the outage. Thousands of users of social media apps reported problems to DownDetector, with nearly 90,000 reports of problems with Facebook as of 1:30 p.m. Eastern. Some Facebook users said that although they were able to access the site, they were unable to post or “like” other users' posts.
“Meta services, including Facebook and Instagram, are currently experiencing an outage that began at approximately 17:55 UTC and is still ongoing,” tech services company Cisco ThousandEyes wrote. wrote Wednesday afternoon at X. “ThousandEyes is detecting internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate problems with Meta's backend services. Network connectivity to Meta's frontend web servers remains unaffected.”
As of 2:45 p.m., thousands of users of Meta's apps were continuing to report problems with access to services, although the number of reports slowed by the afternoon. As of 4:20 pm Eastern there were nearly 4,000 reports of DownDetector being down for Facebook.
According to DownDetector, WhatsApp users also reported problems sending messages. WhatsApp, which is a popular service outside the US for calling other users of the service, had reports of problems from users in countries including Argentina and Brazil.
Wednesday's cut is as follows broader issues with Meta's apps in March, when more than half a million users reported widespread issues, such as getting booted from the social media platform and being unable to log back in. In that case, Meta blamed an unspecified “technical issue” that caused problems for users.