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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Technology
Matt Watts

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all down as 'technical issue' causes massive Meta outage

Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp have allbeen affected (Yui Mok/PA) - (PA Wire)

Meta has experienced a major global outage with thousands of users reporting Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp issues.

"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," Meta, which owns the apps, said on X.

There was a sharp increase in reported outages from users of these various services at around 6pm on Wednesday, according to Downdetector.com.

A variety of issues have been reported including not being able to use the apps at all or feeds not refreshing for certain users.

The UK and parts of Europe, the US, Asia, Australia and South America were all experiencing problems.

The company’s systems appear to have suffered a major technical issue.

According to Downdetector, Facebook outages were first reported at around 6pm and reached more than 100,000 complaints of an issue.

WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, also saw thousands of reported disruptions around the same time.

The number of reports of Instagram outages also peaked at over 67,000 shortly after 6pm.

The actual number of users affected may vary considerably.

Meta's platforms are some of the most popular in the world. Facebook has over three billion active monthly users.

The biggest outage Meta experienced was in 2021, when founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption caused.

On that occasion Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram services went down for almost six hours.

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