A trifecta of Meta-owned social media sites, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp went down for users worldwide Wednesday — with outages to the sites’ business and cloud API and lucrative user-tracking ad tech apparently linked to the issue.
‘We are aware that some advertisers may be experiencing issues either accessing or viewing reporting for their ads,’ a company status report posted at 19:19 GMT (15:19 ET) amid the outage.
‘Our engineering teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue,’ Meta‘s notice continued.
According to DownDetector, a website which monitors such outages, reports of problems on the platforms first began to surface at about 18:00 GMT (14:00 ET).
As of 21:00 GMT (17:00 ET), service appeared to be largely restored for Facebook and WhatsApp, but not Instagram, with some users taking to Reddit to complain, ‘When is Instagram working fine anyways? So tired of the bugs.’
According to DownDetector, a website which monitors such outages, reports of problems on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram (above), first began at about 18:00 GMT (14:00 ET)
‘We are aware that some advertisers may be experiencing issues either accessing or viewing reporting for their ads,’ a company status report posted at 19:19 GMT (15:19 ET) amid the outage. ‘Our engineering teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue’
Instagram logged thousands of complaints within the first half hour of the outage peaking 5,771 – with the site’s issues persisting hours after WhatsApp and Facebook’s were resolved
But messaging service WhatsApp received the most complaints, peaking at 21,269 reports
Complaints regarding Facebook service was comparatively limited, peaking at 1,600 based on one early notice from DownDetector (above)
Instagram logged thousands of complaints within the first half hour of the outage peaking 5,771 — but messaging service WhatsApp received the most complaints, clearing over 21,269 reports at the height of the issue.
Complaints regarding Facebook service was comparatively limited with only 714 reports based on the first notice from DownDetector, cresting at about 1,600 before the short hiccup with the platform was resolved.
Users of Facebook’s desktop client in the Dallas and Houston, Texas areas appeared to be among the hardest hit, based on DownDetector’s tracking of complaints. A large pocket of outage reports for Instagram came from Los Angeles, per the site.
The majority of complaints regarding WhatsApp (69 percent) and Instagram (58 percent) pertained to the mobile app versions of the platforms.
Users of Facebook’s desktop client in the Dallas and Houston, Texas areas appeared to be among the hardest hit, based on DownDetector’s tracking of complaints and reports. A large pocket of outage reports for Instagram came from Los Angeles, per the site
‘It’s always “Instagram is down,” it’s never “Slack is down,”‘ one X user posted, joking about about the popular workplace communication tool
A heat map of user complaints within the past hour and a half, as compiled by DownDetector, showed clusters of reported outages for Instagram, located across New York; Los Angeles; and Chicago.
Many users flocked to Elon Musk ‘s X and to social site Reddit to see if others were experiencing problems.
‘The outages are definitely getting out of hand,’ one Reddit user posted about Instagram.
‘It’s always “Instagram is down,” it’s never “Slack is down,”‘ one X user posted, joking about about the popular workplace communication tool.
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.
In early March, a massive outage that hit Facebook, Instagram and Messenger was reportedly caused by ‘technical issues’ – but Meta did not share exactly what those ‘issues’ were.
The Mark Zuckerberg-owned platforms were down for at least two and a half hours on Tuesday, March 5th, leaving hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their accounts.
A Facebook insider told DailyMail.com that their internal systems were not working at the time Meta’s service dashboard showed ‘major disruptions’ for many of its services.
An internal issue would knock out connections – similar to what happened in 2021 when all of Meta’s platforms were down for seven hours.
