Thousands of users are unable to access Facebook and Instagram apps
By Ramishah Maruf, CNN
New York (CNN) — Meta said Wednesday that it is close to resolving a technical issue that is causing a widespread outage of its apps, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta Newsroom said on X Wednesday afternoon.
WhatsApp and Instagram both confirmed outages via X, and many users are reporting they are unable to access Meta’s apps.
The outage lasted for more than three hours. By around 5:30 pm EST, Meta posted that it was “99% of the way there” to fully solving the issue.
On outage tracking site Downdetector, where users can report issues, Instagram had logged almost 70,000 reports by mid-afternoon Wednesday. Facebook had up to 105,000 outage reports, Facebook Messenger roughly 14,000 and messaging app WhatsApp about 12,500. Threads, the X competitor, also had an uptick in outage reports. Since Downdetector is self-reported, it likely does not reflect the extent of the issues.
Several widespread tech outages have occurred in 2024. In late November, a massive Microsoft Outlook and Teams outage hindered office workers. And earlier this year, in what’s been called the largest IT outage in history, CrowdStrike’s software issue over the summer halted air travel, disrupted hospitals and cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses.
Though it won’t have the same effects, Meta’s platforms are extremely popular among social media users. The company counted 3.98 billion monthly active users across its portfolio in 2023.
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