On Wednesday, users reported widespread issues accessing several of Meta's social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger, as tracked by the outage monitoring service Downdetector.
Outage reports began around 1 p.m. Eastern Time, with users across the U.S. indicating difficulties. Facebook and Instagram users faced issues loading the apps and websites, while Messenger users reported problems logging in and sending messages.
Meta acknowledged the disruption in a statement to CBS News: "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."
By 5:26 p.m. Eastern Time, Meta announced it was close to resolving the issue. "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 X account.
During the peak of the outage, nearly 90,000 users reported problems with Facebook on Downdetector around 1:30 p.m. Eastern. While some users could access the platform, they were unable to post or interact with others' content.
Cisco ThousandEyes, a tech monitoring service, provided additional details: "Meta services, including Facebook and Instagram, are currently experiencing an outage that began at approximately 17:55 UTC and is still ongoing. 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 were still reporting issues, though reports had declined by late afternoon. By 4:20 p.m., Downdetector logged about 4,000 outage reports for Facebook.
WhatsApp users also experienced disruptions, particularly with sending messages. Reports came from countries like Argentina and Brazil, where WhatsApp is widely used for communication.
This latest outage follows a similar incident in March, when over half a million users reported being logged out of Meta's platforms and unable to reconnect. At that time, Meta attributed the issues to an unspecified "technical problem."
