Facebook, Instagram and other Meta apps go down due to ‘technical issue’

Meta’s family of apps including Facebook and Instagram were down on Wednesday, resulting in users being unable to access the services.

The widespread outages began around 9:57 a.m. PST and affected the social media company’s core apps as well as Threads, WhatsApp and Messenger, according to user-submitted reports gathered by the internet-monitoring site Downdetector.

More than 100,000 users experienced problems using the Facebook service at 10:11 a.m. PST, representing the peak of the outages, according to Downdetector.

Meta acknowledged the outage via a morning post on social media site X, saying the company is “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,” the X post said.

A separate Instagram-specific X post in the morning also acknowledged the outage, and said the company recognizes “there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram.”

Later in the day, Meta acknowledged that the outage was still affecting its apps, saying in an afternoon X post that it is “99% of the way there – just doing some last checks.”

Shortly after, Instagram said in an afternoon X post that the photo-sharing service was back online.

“Andddd we’re back — sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us,” Instagram said in the X post.

The company’s various apps experienced a roughly two-hour outage in March 2024, on the same day as the Super Tuesday U.S. presidential primaries.