Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are offline
Meta suffered a widespread outage across its social media and messaging apps on Wednesday, with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads all having loading issues.
Instagram shows error messages on the web and the mobile app has a spinning wheel when you refresh your feed. Although Stories appear to work on Instagram, the ‘Following’ tab also shows a ‘Cannot load activity’ message.
Instagram outage reports started peaking around 10am PT/1pm ET, according to Downdetector, and hit the same time frame Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp And Wires. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
“We are aware that a technical issue is affecting some users’ access to our apps,” Meta posted on X. “We are doing our best to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
There have been fewer reports of outages, but if you refresh our feed you will temporarily see a spinning wheel, followed by loading posts that are at least four hours old.
Cisco ThousandEyes writes the failure to “internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate issues with Meta’s backend services.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the cause of the outage and when it will be fixed.
People went to X (formerly known as Twitter). post about the Instagram outageasking if others experienced the same loading errors and to share memes about the experience.
