Meta's major social platforms experienced a widespread service disruption on Wednesday, leaving billions of users unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other services for several hours.
The disruption began around 12:30 PM Eastern Time (5:30 PM London), affecting users across multiple continents including North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Users reported various issues ranging from complete inability to access the apps to problems with message delivery and news feed updates.
The outage impacted not just Meta's consumer apps but also its business products including Facebook Ads Manager, Instagram's Messenger API, and the "Login with Facebook" feature used by many third-party websites. This comprehensive disruption suggests the problem stemmed from a central system failure affecting Meta's entire infrastructure.
"We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps," Meta announced on X (formerly Twitter) during the outage. The company later reported they were "99% of the way there" in resolving the issues.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, over 22,000 users reported problems with Facebook, while more than 18,000 experienced difficulties with WhatsApp during the peak of the disruption.
This marks Meta's largest service interruption since 2021, when its platforms went dark for nearly six hours. That incident prompted an apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg due to its widespread impact.
By Wednesday evening, most services had been restored. "And we're back, happy chatting!" WhatsApp announced on X, while Instagram followed with "Andddd we're back - sorry for the wait."
While Meta has not officially disclosed the cause of the outage, early reports suggest back-end server issues may have been responsible. The incident highlights the far-reaching consequences of technical failures in platforms that serve billions of users worldwide, from families using WhatsApp for communication to businesses relying on Instagram and Facebook for customer engagement.
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