Facebook and Instagram down for thousands of Australians

Thousands of Australians have been hit by a global social media outage, preventing access to their Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram accounts.

Frustrated social media users were unable to connect to Facebook and Instagram around 4:30 a.m. on Thursday after the platforms encountered a technical glitch.

Users reported problems accessing sites like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to DownDetector.

The highest number of user reports in Australia were recorded in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth at 5.40am, with many claiming they had an issue with the apps, websites or server connections.

Globally, more than 100,000 Facebook users reported an issue on DownDetector, while tens of thousands of Instagram users reported similar issues.

Moreover, a wave of complaints was registered from WhatsApp and Threads users.

On platform

“Meta down. Instagram isn’t working. WhatsApp is slow. Facebook is logged out,” one person wrote.

Social media users have been hit by a global outage, with thousands of Australians unable to connect to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, wrote on X that it was aware of a technical issue impacting its users

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, wrote on X that it was aware of a technical issue impacting its users

“Facebook is down, so of course everyone is flocking to Twitter to confirm it’s not just them. Classic,” a second person commented.

A third said: ‘Everyone comes to see if Instagram is offline. Yes, you’re not alone,’ while a fourth added: ‘Yes, you’re not alone. WhatsApp is offline worldwide!’.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, wrote that it was aware of a technical issue impacting its users.

‘We are aware that a technical issue is affecting some users’ access to our apps.

“We are doing our best to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience caused.”