Thousands of users across the UK and globally experienced issues accessing WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook on Wednesday evening during a major outage at parent company Meta. The problems, which began around 18:00, saw users flock to other social media platforms to report their frustrations.
According to UK monitoring site Downdetector, WhatsApp reported around 82,000 issues at 18:25, while Instagram and Facebook saw 3,700 and 1,840 outages respectively at similar times. The technical problems were not confined to the UK, with Reuters reporting about 5,000 Instagram users affected in the United States and 24,000 WhatsApp users at peak.
Meta's status site later indicated that most issues had been resolved, though the company has not yet responded to requests for comment. WhatsApp acknowledged the outage in a post on X, formerly Twitter, stating: 'We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.'
International users were also impacted, with nearly 3,500 reports in India and more than 7,000 in Brazil, according to Downdetector. The outage follows a similar incident in March, when hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were affected for over two hours due to a technical issue.
Meta, which also owns Threads, has approximately 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps.
