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Meta suffered a widespread outage across its social media and messaging apps on Wednesday, affecting Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads. By late afternoon, the apps were almost fully functional again.
“Thanks for putting up with us! We’re 99% of the way there, we’re just doing some last checks.” Posted goal on X at 2:26 pm PT/5:56 pm ET. “We apologize to those who have been affected by the outage.”
Instagram outage reports began shooting around 10 a.m. PT, according to Downdetector, and the same time period reached Facebook, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Rags. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Instagram displayed error messages on the web version and the mobile app had a spinning wheel when users tried to refresh their feeds. Although Stories appeared to be working, the “next” tab also displayed a “activity could not be loaded” message. Within a few hours, the reports began to decrease, although pages were still slow to load and were only loading hours-old posts.
“We are aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our applications.” Meta published in X at 10:48 a.m. Pacific Time. “We are working to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Cisco ThousandEyes attributes the court to “internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate problems with Meta backend services.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the cause of the outage.
People turned to X (formerly known as Twitter) to post about Instagram outageasking if others were experiencing the same loading errors and to share memes about the experience.
