Instagram, WhatsApp & Facebook experience global outages for hours but now up & running

Millions of people reported outages for the apps on DownDetector on Wednesday as they couldn’t log in or make any post.

Reports of outages soared starting around 12:30 p.m. EST, with more than 100,000 Facebook users reporting their problems on DownDetector by around 1:10 p.m. EST.

Tens of thousands of Instagram users also reported problems, while there was a similar spike for WhatsApp and Threads.

Just before 3:30 p.m., the number of reported outages on Facebook had dropped to about 18,000, Instagram reports fell to about 16,000 from a peak of more than 68,000 and reports of issues on WhatsApp and Messenger were far below their peaks.

Upon trying to access Facebook, some users were met with an error message reading “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

Meta’s status and outages page for its business products said almost all listed tools and platforms including Facebook Ads Manager, Messenger API for Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp Business API were suffering “major disruptions” as of just after 3 p.m. EST.

In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta said it’s “aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps” and they are “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”