Users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp faced significant accessibility issues due to a widespread global outage affecting Meta's services. Reports spanning various countries indicate that the outage began around 1800 GMT on Wednesday and has impacted users in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the US.
According to Downdetector, a site for tracking online outages, over 22,000 reported difficulties with Facebook, while more than 18,000 experienced troubles using WhatsApp. Users reported a range of problems, from being unable to access the apps entirely to experiencing unresponsive feeds.
Meta acknowledged the situation through a post on X, stating, "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."
This outage is reminiscent of the significant disruption Meta faced in 2021, which also affected all its major platforms for nearly six hours. During that incident, Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, publicly apologized for the disruption caused to users worldwide. Given the popularity of Meta's platforms, with Facebook hosting over three billion monthly active users, such outages generate substantial conversation and concern online.
