Users on Wednesday reported problems accessing a number of Meta’s social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger, according to outage tracking service Downdetector.
Reports of outages from cities across the U.S. began at about 1 p.m. Eastern Time, according to Downdetector. Facebook and Instagram users said they had difficulty accessing the apps and websites, while Messenger users said they had issues logging into the service and sending messages.
“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,” a Meta spokesperson told CBS News earlier this afternoon.
A few hours later, at 5:26 p.m. Eastern Time, Meta announced it was close to having the issue resolved.
“Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99% of the way there — just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” the company posted on its account on X.
At the peak of the outage. tens of thousands of users of the social media apps reported problems to Downdetector, with almost 90,000 reports of issues with Facebook as of 1:30 p.m. Eastern. Some Facebook users said that while they were able to access the site, they were unable to post or “like” other users’ posts.
“Meta services, including Facebook and Instagram, are currently experiencing an outage that began at approximately 17:55 UTC and is still ongoing,” wrote Cisco ThousandEyes, a tech service company, wrote on X on Wednesday afternoon. “ThousandEyes is detecting internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate issues with Meta’s backend services. Network connectivity to Meta’s frontend web servers remains unaffected.”
As of 2:45 p.m., thousands of users of Meta’s apps were continuing to report issues with accessing the services, although the number of reports slowed by late afternoon. There were about 4,000 reports of outages on Downdetector for Facebook as of 4:20 p.m. Eastern.
WhatsApp users also reported issues with sending messages, according to Downdetector. WhatsApp, a popular service outside the U.S. for making calls to other users of the service, had reports of problems from users in countries including Argentina and Brazil.
Wednesday’s outage follows widespread issues with Meta’s apps in March, when more than half a million users reported widespread issues, such as getting booted out of the social media platforms and unable to log back in. In that case, Meta blamed an unspecified “technical issue” that caused problems for users.