Meta has said it is “99% of the way there” in solving a social media blackout with its apps, which caused issues with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
At about 10pm GMT on Wednesday, monitoring website Downdetector said there had been 23,445 reports of Facebook outages, 11,466 for Instagram and 18,646 for WhatsApp across Britain, while in the US all three sites seemed largely unaffected.
In an update issued at 10.26pm on X, Meta said the problem was now nearly resolved. A spokesperson said: “Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99% of the way there – just doing some last checks. We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage.”
Earlier in the evening, Downdetector was showing large spikes of problems for people using Facebook and other Meta apps. Facebook outages were first reported at about 6pm on Wednesday, with more than 100,000 complaints registered in both the UK and US.
Instagram and WhatsApp were also facing similar complaints, with users around the world unable to send or receive messages.
The outages were nowhere near as severe as Facebook’s 2021 outage, when a configuration error in a little-known protocol called BGP led to the company accidentally deleting its own address from the systems that allow servers to talk to each other on the internet.
Although that error was spotted immediately, it took several hours for the fix to be enacted and take effect – in part because the company’s engineers could no longer gain remote access to their own servers to fix the problem; nor could they use their corporate passes to get through the electronic locks to gain physical access.
However, it is not the first time this year that Meta services have been hit by worldwide outages. In March, Facebook and Instagram experienced severe issues around the world, with the services refusing login attempts and feeds stalling.
Meta said in a statement on its social network, Threads, at the time: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
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