Meta-owned social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, experienced widespread outages on Wednesday night, leaving millions of users unable to access the apps.
The disruption affected users across the globe, with many reporting issues connecting to their accounts and accessing the platforms’ features, causing frustration for both personal and business users.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, confirmed the outage, acknowledging the issue and reassuring users that they were working to resolve it promptly. In a brief statement, Meta said, “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks real-time issues and outages of social media platforms, nearly 1,000 users in Pakistan reported disruptions around 11:00 PM local time. The website also indicated that WhatsApp, another popular Meta-owned app, was experiencing problems. Since 10:52 PM, over 2,200 users in Pakistan alone had filed outage reports. This highlighted the widespread nature of the issue, affecting not only Instagram and Facebook but also WhatsApp, a vital communication tool for millions around the world, especially in business and customer service operations.
Instagram users, in particular, were impacted by the outage, with over 1,200 disruption reports registered on Downdetector during the same time period. Many users took to rival platform X (formerly known as Twitter) to express their frustration, with several posting screenshots of the error message that read, “Something went wrong,” signaling that Meta was aware of the problem and working to restore services.
This latest outage follows a series of disruptions for Meta platforms in recent months. Earlier this year, Facebook and Instagram were offline for more than two hours due to a technical glitch, affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Another outage occurred in October, though services were largely restored within an hour. As Meta works to resolve the current issue, users are eagerly awaiting the platforms’ return to normal functionality, hoping that these disruptions won’t continue to affect their digital presence.