On Wednesday, several popular apps owned by Meta, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, experienced outages affecting users nationwide. Reports of disruptions began surfacing around 1 p.m. ET, with the majority of issues concentrated on the mobile apps rather than desktop versions.
Facebook Messenger saw the highest percentage of outages among the affected platforms. Users reported difficulty accessing the apps, sending messages, and loading content.Services gradually resumed within the hour, but some users continued to experience intermittent issues.
Meta, the parent company of these platforms, acknowledged the problem on social media, 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.”
The company did not immediately disclose the cause of the outages.
While brief, the outage disrupted communication and social media activity for millions of users. This incident follows a series of similar disruptions in recent years, highlighting the reliance on Meta’s platforms for both personal and professional communication. The swift restoration of service suggests Meta’s technical teams were able to resolve the issue efficiently.
Earlier this year, Facebook, Instagram and Threads were down for users across the world on Super Tuesday.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, as many as 500,000 Facebook users had reported issues logging in or accessing the site.
Some users found they had been logged out of their Facebook accounts while others got notifications on Instagram that “something went wrong” and their feeds could not be loaded.
The outage came as many people were getting ready to cast their vote in multiple states across the country.
