Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp Back Online After Major Technical Issues

Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, highly popular social media platforms, are gradually restoring their online services after encountering significant technical issues, much to the relief of their millions of users worldwide.

Major Outage Hits Social Media Platforms

A technical glitch severely disrupted several of Meta‘s key applications including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger for hours on Wednesday. While acknowledging the outages, Meta reported that they had largely resolved the issue but did not provide specifics on what caused the disruption.

Ongoing Recovery Efforts

As of 4:30 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday, Meta’s service status dashboard still showed “severe disruptions” impacting its business and transparency tools. However, other services were marked as “resolved” or “recovering”. It appears that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Messenger are mostly back to normal functionality.

Thousands of Users Impacted

Earlier in the day, Downdetector reported over 90,000 issues with Facebook.com alone, with users globally experiencing problems loading and using Meta’s apps. For a period, Meta’s own website displayed a message stating “This page is currently unavailable”. When Engadget reached out to Meta for comments, the company referred to a brief statement acknowledging that “a technical issue is affecting some users’ ability to access our apps”.

Recurring Technical Issues

This isn’t the first time Meta has encountered such issues. In March 2024, a major outage prevented users from accessing its apps and services for two hours. The disruption was attributed to a “technical problem” by Meta’s Communications Director, Andy Stone, an explanation that was repeated for this Wednesday’s events.