Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp Reportedly Down for Thousands of Users During Global Outage

Thousands of US users across Meta Platforms' social media offerings Instagram and Facebook, and messaging app WhatsApp reported outages on Monday, according to Downdetector.com.

As many as 13,000 users reported issues with accessing Instagram, while around 5,400 and 1,870 users faced outages on Facebook and WhatsApp, respectively.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage could have affected a larger number of users. Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters query on the outages.

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

At the time, 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. 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