(NEXSTAR) — Meta says it has nearly restored service to its platforms after "a technical issue" caused widespread issues on Wednesday.
Early Wednesday afternoon, user-reported issues spiked across the company's social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. User-reported issues for Facebook alone topped 90,000 on Downdetector as of 12:30 p.m. CT. Outage reports for Instagram had exceeded 60,000, while about 11,000 were reported on Messenger and WhatsApp.
The leading complaints for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were related to the app, Downdetector shows. The top issue for WhatsApp users was sending messages while Messenger users were struggling to log in.
Users outside of the U.S. were also reporting issues with the Meta sites on Downdetector. Complaints were reported in Brazil, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Panama, Portugal, and Venezuela, among other countries.
Meta's status tracker showed major disruptions across almost all business tools, developer platforms, and transparency tools just before 2:30 p.m. CT. As of 5 p.m. CT, some were marked as resolved or recovering.
In separate posts to X before 1 p.m. CT, Meta and Instagram acknowledged users' ability to access platforms, citing "a technical issue."
"We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience," Meta wrote. WhatsApp wrote that it was "starting to see a return to normal for most people" shortly before 1 p.m. CT.
In another post around 4:30 p.m. CT, Meta said it was "99% of the way there."
"....Just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who've been affected by the outage," the post read.
No additional details about what caused the outage were provided.
In March, Facebook and Instagram users found themselves locked out of their accounts during a widespread outage that also impacted Messenger and Threads. Andy Stone, Meta’s head of communications, addressed the outage on X, explaining that "a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services."
