Meta says it’s ‘99% of the way there’ in restoring Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp
Meta suffered a widespread outage across its social media and messaging apps on Wednesday, with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads all affected. By late afternoon the apps were almost fully functional again.
“Thank you for supporting us! We’re 99% of the way – just doing some final checks,” Meta posted on X at 2:26 PM PT/5:56 PM ET. “We apologize to those affected by the outage.”
Instagram outage reports started peaking around 10 a.m. PT, according to Downdetector, and the same time frame began Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp And Wires. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Instagram showed error messages on the web version and the mobile app had a spinning wheel when users tried to refresh their feeds. Although Stories seemed to work, the ‘Following’ tab also showed a ‘Cannot load activity’ message. Within a few hours, reports started to drop, although pages were still loading slowly and only messages that were hours old were loading.
“We are aware that a technical issue is affecting some users’ access to our apps,” Meta posted on X at 10:48 a.m. PT. “We are doing our best to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience caused.”
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.
