Global Social Media Outage: Key Facts and Insights on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads Downtime

Meta Outage: A Rough Ride for Users

As millions of users worldwide, Meta’s services went dark yesterday, leaving many wondering what was happening. The issues started with Threads, Meta’s newer social media platform, where image uploads began to fail. Soon, Instagram and Facebook feeds started to disappear, leaving users feeling frustrated and disconnected.

Mopping Up

At around 6PM, Meta returned to X to inform users that they were "99% of the way there" in resolving the issues. While it’s unclear what caused the outage, it’s reassuring to know that the team is working hard to fix the problem.

A Rough Ride for WhatsApp

WhatsApp, a private messaging app, had the roughest ride of all. With two massive outage report spikes, users were left unable to send or receive messages. Based on the current chart, it appears that WhatsApp is slowly recovering.

A Recovery

By 3:58 PM ET, most of Meta’s major services began to recover. Down Detector showed a significant downturn in outage reports, and Instagram notifications reappeared. Threads, for the most part, started accepting image uploads again.

How it Started

The outage started with Threads, where the platform began rejecting image uploads. Soon, feeds started to disappear, and the issues spread to Instagram and Facebook.

AWS’ Role

As Down Detector reported, AWS, Meta’s cloud provider, was also struggling in the early afternoon. This might indicate a bigger issue than one company’s servers, as AWS serves countless websites and online services.

Timeline

Here’s a quick recap of the events:

20:49:17 – AWS and Meta services start to struggle
20:57:21 – We first notice the outage on Threads
21:01:17 – Meta’s services start to recover
21:11:34 – WhatsApp reports two massive outage spikes
21:39:01 – Meta’s services appear to be fully recovered

As the dust settles, it’s clear that yesterday’s outage was a rough ride for Meta users. While we’re grateful that the services are back up and running, it’s a good reminder of the importance of cloud infrastructure and the challenges that come with it.

What do you think caused the outage? Let us know in the comments!