A debilitating service outage has hit several of Meta’s apps, with thousands of people across the United States having reported issues accessing their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts.
According to the monitoring website DownDetector, the outage appears to have started at around 12:36 p.m. EST, with Facebook being hit first before the outage extended to the other platforms. Facebook seems to have been affected the worst, as service interruption reports peaked at 107,005 around 1 p.m. EST.
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Instagram saw its peak hit 68,108 reports on DownDetector, while WhatsApp fared better at 9,301 reports. Threads was also affected, although its interruption wasn’t as severe, seeing only 789 reports. Keep in mind these are just one source. It’s possible a lot more people were unable to log in.
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Meta is well aware of these issues and is working on a fix. The tech giant has published a statement X saying it is attempting “to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and [it apologizes] for any inconvenience.” If you go to Meta’s Status website, you’ll see that most of the company’s services are experiencing “major disruptions” at the time of this writing. It is currently unknown what is causing the disruptions.
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It does appear the services are slowly coming back. Instagram was inaccessible earlier, and nothing was refreshing. However, the feed on my personal account managed to update, and I could save posts, although Story posts remain unviewable.
Service may come back soon, but the exact time remains unknown. We’ll update you with more information as it becomes available.
Update (December 11, 2024, 6:05 p.m. EST): The outage has continued late into the day. However, more information has come to light, including a possible cause. Network intelligence firm Cisco ThounsandEyes published a statement on X claiming it has detected “internal server errors and timeouts” on Meta’s servers, indicating “issues with [the company’s” backend services.” The frontend web servers have been unaffected. It remains to be seen if these errors were the result of a cyberattack or some sort of backend failure.
Indicators on Meta’s status website still show that most of the tech giant’s platforms are suffering from “major disruptions.” However, reports on Down Detector have sharply dropped since the initial peak in the early afternoon, which could suggest that services are slowly coming back.
