On Wednesday, thousands of users reported issues accessing Meta’s widely-used apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. At one point, Downdetector showed over 200,000 reports of problems with these platforms combined.
Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged the issue and said, “We’re aware that a technical problem is affecting some users’ ability to access our apps.” The company promised to resolve the issue quickly and apologized for the inconvenience.
By the time of this report, service had largely been restored. However, around 10,000 users in the United States continued to report problems with Facebook, while similar complaints were made about Instagram and WhatsApp. Users also mentioned issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and uploading posts on Instagram and Facebook.
Downdetector showed that in India, 68% of users reported app-related issues, 21% had log-in problems, and 11% faced trouble accessing Instagram’s website. Meanwhile, 89% of WhatsApp users had trouble sending messages, and 9% experienced app malfunctions.
However, later, Meta took to X and mentioned, they were back online. “Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99% of the way there – just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” read their statement.
Users flocked to social media and in no time the internet was flooded with comments. One said, “How can all apps suddenly go off together,” whereas another commented, “Feels like the world has paused.”
On December 12, WhatsApp confirmed the technical issue was resolved. Meta’s largest outage had occurred in 2021 when founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the disruption caused. During that incident, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all down for nearly 6 hours.
