Meta apps Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were experiencing issues Wednesday afternoon as thousands of people reported outages for the apps on DownDetector—though Meta said just after 5:30 p.m. EST the issue was almost fixed.

In an aerial view, people gather in front of a sign posted at Meta headquarters on July 07, 2023 in … [+] Menlo Park, California. Since launching, Meta’s new Threads platform has soared to 70 million users. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Key Facts

Reports of outages soared starting around 12:30 p.m. EST, with more than 100,000 Facebook users reporting their problems on DownDetector by around 1:10 p.m. EST.

Tens of thousands of Instagram users also reported problems, while there was a similar spike for WhatsApp and Threads.

Just before 5:30 p.m., the number of reported outages on Facebook had dropped to just over 1,200, Instagram reports fell to about 1,900 from a peak of more than 68,000 and reports of issues on WhatsApp and Messenger were far below their peaks.

Upon trying to access Facebook, some users were met with an error message reading “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

Meta’s status and outages page for its business products said almost all listed tools and platforms including Facebook Ads Manager, Messenger API for Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp Business API were suffering “major disruptions” as of just after 5:30 p.m. EST.

But in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, just after 5:30 p.m., Meta thanked people for bearing with it and said, “We’re 99% of the way there – just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who’ve been affected by the outage.”

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Key Background

Meta’s outage on Wednesday comes after a global outage in March that lasted more than two hours. Meta said that outage was caused by a technical issue, Reuters reported, and it impacted hundreds of thousands of users. At the peak of that outage, there were more than 538,000 reports of issues with Facebook and more than 91,000 issues with Instagram, The New York Times reported.

Tangent

Meta’s outage follows at least two other recent tech outages. On Nov. 25, some Microsoft platforms were down for more than a day. Microsoft didn’t specify what change impacted programs, though the outage happened the same day as the rollout of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that was meant to take regular snapshots of computer activity. Earlier that week on Nov. 21, Reddit had two outages in 24 hours as more than 76,000 users logged reports of issues with the site and app on DownDetector.

Forbes Valuation

Meta is ranked 24th on the Forbes’ Global 2000 list of the world’s largest public companies, according to sales, profits, assets and market value. Meta was listed with about $142.7 billion in sales, $45.8 billion in profit and a market value of $1.197 trillion as of June.