Three Meta-owned social media sites—Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp—experienced worldwide outages on Wednesday afternoon.
As of 2:21 p.m., WhatsApp Messenger reported over 24,000 issues in the U.S., according to the user reporting site Down Detector, which monitors outages by collating status reports from sources, including user-submitted errors, on its platform.
Seventy percent of the WhatsApp issues had to do with the app, while 24 percent were related to users being unable to receive messages. Six percent of the issues were related to the WhatsApp website.
By 3 p.m., WhatsApp issue reports in the U.S. had dropped to just over 2,000.
More than 20,000 WhatsApp users in India, about 46,000 in the U.K. and over 42,000 in Brazil also reported problems with the platform on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
Just before 3 p.m., WhatsApp's account on X (formerly Twitter) posted: "We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible."
NetBlocks, which reports on internet governance, cybersecurity and telecommunications disruptions, wrote on X: "Meta platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp are currently experiencing international outages, particularly impacting image/media uploads; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering."
Down Detector reported nearly 6,000 Instagram outages in the U.S. as of 2:21 p.m. There were still over 3,500 reported Instagram issues in the U.S. as of 4 p.m., with most reported problems stemming from the app.
Facebook's outages in the U.S. were nearly 5,000 at around 2:30 p.m. Most of the reported issues were related to the app, according to Down Detector. Reported Facebook issues declined to under 500 in the U.S. by 3 p.m.
Meta's status and outages page shows disruptions to a host of its services.
Newsweek reached out to Meta and WhatsApp via email on Wednesday afternoon. As of 5 p.m., neither Facebook nor Instagram have posted a confirmation of any issues via their social accounts.
Last month, hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were affected for more than two hours following an outage.
Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its apps, which also includes Threads, according to Reuters.
Update 4/3/24, 4:51 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional information.
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