Downtime on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads Today

Given the global outages of the internet giant’s Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and Instagram, Meta’s tech workers are probably having a rough day.

Earlier today on Wednesday, there have been problems with some Meta apps. Many employees at The Verge and users globally experienced issues with Facebook and Instagram applications not loading or seeing older posts when the outage initially occurred at approximately 1 PM ET. Many of the platforms stopped updating and wouldn’t accept posts, even though none of them seemed to produce 500 errors. But things appear to be getting better.

Services began to decline at approximately 0900 PT (1700 UTC). As one might anticipate from a large distributed system, some users are able to access Meta’s apps and websites normally, while others continue to have issues that prevent them from using the system as intended.

At one time, WhatsApp seemed to be recovering, but it crashed again. As of writing, Meta’s status page reports “major” disruption to all of the platform’s services, with the curious exception of “some” disruption to the ad transparency tools.

On X, formerly Twitter, Meta says, “They were aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access their apps,” and that “they apologize for any inconvenience and are working to return things to normal as soon as possible.”

Netizens who couldn’t access their typical fix of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp poured their concerns onto Downdetector.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram all saw large, abrupt jumps in Downdetector, suggesting that many individuals were impacted by the outages. For instance, the Instagram Downdetector page displays a peak of over 70,000 complaints about the app. Over 100,000 people were on Facebook at its peak.

Down Detector displays a sharp rise in outage complaints for every service that begins at around 12:00 ET, . They have gradually and nearly entirely healed since then. Some unrelated websites and services, such as Reddit and Amazon’s AWS service, which supports many of the well-known websites and services on the Internet, also seemed to be having issues at the same time, according to Down Detector.

This significant outage comes after another significant Meta outage that shut down Threads, Facebook, and Instagram in March. Conspiracy theorists came out of hiding when its systems failed on Super Tuesday, the election day in March. In October 2022, Meta also experienced a significant outage that affected Facebook and Instagram.

Users were unable to update their feeds or submit photographs on Threads. They also noticed that there were no notifications on Instagram. They reached out to Meta for a reaction, and they will update this live blog with it.

It doesn’t appear to be a complete outage. There are issues in Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific, according to informal testing conducted by your humble vultures worldwide, but even then, persons sitting next to each other in an office are receiving different results.

The majority of Meta’s platforms now seem to be functional, which is wonderful news. It all went down (and back up) like this.

As this most recent IT failure progresses, we’ll provide more details.