Meta Restores Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp After Outage Reports From Several Users

Meta Platforms said on Friday that services on its social media apps Facebook and Instagram were restored, more than two hours after an outage that affected thousands of users.

At one point, nearly 20,000 users in total said they were having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram and Meta's messaging service WhatsApp, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

Meta announced on Twitter that it is working to resolve issues, shortly after the outage reports started emerging.

Outage reports had come down to less than 500 as of 6:30pm ET (4:00am IST, Saturday), according to Downdetector.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may be affecting a larger number of users.

Issues with Meta's Ads Manager, the advertising tool that lets brands buy and create Facebook ads, were also resolved, the company said.

However, the outage issues were not global. In India, Facebook and Instagram were working fine for most of the users.

In other news, Meta has recently rolled back a policy that was put in place to curb the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 on Facebook and Instagram. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter came under immense pressure to tackle misinformation related to the pandemic, including false claims about vaccines, prompting them to take stringent measures.

The Facebook parent in July last year sought the opinion of its independent oversight board on changes to its current approach, given the improvement in authentic sources of information and general awareness around COVID.

© Thomson Reuters 2023