Meta Apps, which comprise Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, faced huge outages on Wednesday and left millions of users cut off from services. It started during the early afternoon and remained for hours until it was largely restored.
Key Facts About the Outage
Outages were first reported around 12:30 p.m. EST with error messages such as, “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.” Reports for Facebook topped over 100,000 and for Instagram, more than 68,000, according to DownDetector, a service that tracks service disruptions. WhatsApp and Threads also saw significant disruptions during the same timeframe.
Services have largely been “99% restored”, Meta stated by 5:30 p.m. EST via X, formerly known as Twitter. The number of problems started to diminish to just under 1,200 reports for Facebook and around 1,900 reports for Instagram as of this hour.
Services were interrupted or slowed, though, on many of its business tools – including WhatsApp Business API, and Facebook Ads Manager. Confirmations from the status page of Meta.
Meta’s Response
Meta acknowledged the outage in a post on X, apologizing to affected users and thanking them for their patience. By 6:02 p.m. EST, Instagram confirmed its return to normal operations, stating, “Andddd we’re back—sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us.”
Background on Meta Outages
This is one among a series of recent technical outages on Meta’s platforms. Last March, Meta experienced a blackout for more than two hours due to technical glitches. That incident had sent hundreds of thousands of users worldwide into a frenzy with issues on DownDetector.
Outages did occur in October 2022 and November 2023; such outages further reiterate the challenges that Meta has to ensure that billions of its users remain continually connected.
The outage raises the awareness of high dependency on Meta’s platforms regarding day-to-day communication and business activities, besides personal relations. All of Meta’s platforms have together reached over 3 billion active users, making an outage particularly destructive.
Meta ranks 24th on Forbes’ Global 2000 list with a market valuation of $1.197 trillion as of June. These numbers place the company at the top position in the tech industry; however, outages will only undermine the confidence of the users and create doubt regarding the robustness of the infrastructure.
Tangent: Recent Tech Outages
Meta’s troubles fit a broader pattern of technical failures across top-tier tech companies. Microsoft, for example, recently faced a multi-day blackout on several of its services when it was releasing new software. In November, Reddit had two major outages within 24 hours that blacked out tens of thousands of users.
Future
Although these outages have since been resolved, they bring questions of system stability at Meta into view. It is only when growing user bases and increasingly inter-connected digital ecosystems put greater emphasis on the continuous provision of uninterrupted service.
Meta has so far not released information about what particularly led to the outage, but the company continues affirming its efforts towards greater platform stability. To end, these events are some form of reminder to most users on the importance of having diversified means of communicating and storing data so as not to rely on a specific service.
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