WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps hit by outage
By Jemma Dempsey
WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram all went down briefly on Wednesday during a major outage at parent company Meta.
Thousands of app users reported issues accessing the three sites late in the day, with people taking to other social media to air grievances.
Meta’s status site later indicated that most issues had been resolved. The company has so far not responded to a request for comment.
Problems began around 18:00 GMT (14:00 EST) on Wednesday.
The UK site Downdetector, which monitors the performance of websites, indicated around 82,000 issues with WhatsApp at 18:25 but an hour later the issue appeared to have been largely resolved.
Users on Instagram reported around 3,700 outages at 18:20, with numbers persisting for a couple of hours.
Similarly, Facebook users advised of issues at the same time with 1,840 outages reported at 18:23.
The technical problem was not confined to the UK – Reuters news agency reported that about 5,000 people faced issues with Instagram in the United States. At its peak, around 24,000 WhatsApp users also experienced problems.
