A trifecta of Meta-owned social media sites, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp went down for users worldwide Wednesday afternoon, leaving thousands disconnected from family, friends, memes, and their favorite influencers’ feeds.
A spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc. reported that ‘major disruptions’ in its ads transparency tools were behind the outages. The company. according to its status page, is now working to address the issue.
According to DownDetector, a website which monitors such outages, reports of problems on these platforms first began to surface at about 18:00 GMT (14:00 ET). Instagram logged thousands of complaints within the first half hour of the outage above 3,100 — but messaging service WhatsApp received the most complaints, clearing over 10,000 reports in that same amount of time.
Complaints regarding Facebook service was comparatively limited, only 714 reports based on the last notice from Down Detector. Users of Facebook’s desktop client in the Dallas and Houston, Texas areas appeared to among the hardest hit, based on the site’s tracking of complaints and reports.
The majority of complaints regarding WhatsApp (percent) and Instagram (percent) pertained to the mobile app versions of these social platforms.
Many users flocked to Elon Musk ‘s X to see if others were experiencing problems. And, in a post to X, the official account for Meta’s WhatsApp said, ‘We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100 percent for everyone as quickly as possible.’
Users mostly said they were unable to send messages, but others reported being unable to receive them. Some users even declared that they could not access the apps at all. Facebook’s parent company Meta has not revealed a cause for the problem.
But a heat map of user complaints within the past few hours, as compiled by DownDetector, showed clusters of reported outages for Instagram, located across New York; Los Angeles; and Chicago.