WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram all went down briefly on Wednesday during a major outage at parent company Meta.
Late in the day, thousands of app users encountered difficulties accessing WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, prompting them to express their frustrations on alternative social media platforms.
Meta’s status site later indicated that most of the issues had been resolved, though the company has yet to respond to requests for comments.
The problems commenced around 18:00 GMT (14:00 EST) on Wednesday.
According to the UK site Downdetector, approximately 82,000 issues with WhatsApp were reported around 18:25, but an hour later, the problem seemed to have largely subsided.
At 18:20, Instagram users reported approximately 3,700 outages, which persisted for a couple of hours.
Similarly, Facebook users reported issues around the same time, with 1,840 outages noted at 18:23.
The technical difficulties were not limited to the UK; Reuters news agency stated that about 5,000 people encountered issues with Instagram in the United States. At its peak, around 24,000 WhatsApp users also faced problems.
WhatsApp said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.”
According to Downdetector, nearly 3,500 users in India and over 7,000 in Brazil also encountered issues with the platform.
In March, a global outage lasting over two hours affected hundreds of thousands of users of the social media company’s Facebook and Instagram due to a technical issue.
Meta boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its suite of apps, which also includes Threads.