Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram Stumble On And Offline In Global Outage

Updated Meta's techies are likely having a bad day as the internet titan's Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and Instagram are suffering some degree of downtime globally.

Services started dropping off around 0900 PT (1700 UTC). As you might expect from a huge distributed system, some people can or could get through to Meta's apps and sites as normal, and some are ran or are still running into errors and unable to use stuff as expected.

WhatsApp appeared to be getting back online at one point but again fell down. Meta's status page reports "major" disruption to all of the platform's services, at time of writing, with the odd exception of ad transparency tools experiencing just "some" disruption.

Downdetector was flooded with complaints from netizens unable to get their usual fix of Facebook, Insta, and Threads as well as WhatsApp.

It's not a total outage, it seems. Informal testing by your humble vultures around the world indicated that there are problems in Europe, US, and Asia-Pacific, but even then people sitting next to each other in an office are getting different results.

"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," Mark Zuckerberg's minions said in a statement on X, which is holding up just fine.

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It's at least second time unlucky for Meta in 2024, since its empire's services also had an outage earlier this year. In March its servers failed on the Super Tuesday election day - which prompted conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork. Thankfully that outage only lasted a few hours. [Thankfully? – ed.]

We'll have more on this latest IT breakdown as it develops. ®

Updated to add at midnight UTC

Meta claims it has mostly righted its systems and got its properties back online as normal.

"Thanks for bearing with us," the biz xeeted. "We’re 99 percent of the way there - just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who’ve been affected by the outage."