Meta’s Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook were thrown into chaos for three hours during a global outage

A trifecta of social media sites from Meta, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp went dark for users around the world on Wednesday – with outages to the site’s business and cloud API and lucrative user tracking ad technology apparently linked to the problem.

“We are aware that some advertisers may be experiencing difficulty accessing or viewing reporting for their ads,” said a business status report posted at 7:19 PM GMT (3:19 PM ET) during the outage.

“Our technical teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue,” Meta continued.

According to DownDetector, a website that monitors such outages, reports of issues on the platforms first emerged around 6:00 PM GMT (2:00 PM ET).

As of 9:00 PM GMT (5:00 PM ET), service appeared to be largely restored for Facebook and WhatsApp, but not for Instagram, with some users taking to Reddit to complain: ‘When does Instagram actually work properly? So tired of the bugs.’

“We are aware that some advertisers may be experiencing difficulty accessing or viewing reporting for their ads,” said a business status report posted at 7:19 PM GMT (3:19 PM ET) during the outage. “Our technical teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue.”

Instagram recorded thousands of complaints within the first half hour of the outage, peaking at 5,771 – with the site’s problems persisting hours after WhatsApp and Facebook were resolved

But messaging service WhatsApp received the most complaints, with a peak of 21,269 reports

Complaints about the Facebook service were relatively limited, peaking at 1,600 based on an early notice from DownDetector (above)

Instagram recorded thousands of complaints within the first half hour of the outage, peaking at 5,771 – but messaging service WhatsApp received the most complaints, clearing more than 21,269 reports at the height of the problem.

The number of complaints about the Facebook service was relatively limited: only 714 reports based on the initial report from DownDetector, peaking at around 1,600 before the brief hiccup with the platform was resolved.

Users of Facebook’s desktop client in the Dallas and Houston, Texas, areas appeared to be the hardest hit, based on DownDetector’s complaint tracking. A large number of Instagram outage reports came from Los Angeles, according to the site.

The majority of complaints about WhatsApp (69 percent) and Instagram (58 percent) related to the mobile app versions of the platforms.

Users of Facebook’s desktop client in the Dallas and Houston, Texas, areas appeared to be the hardest hit, based on DownDetector’s tracking of complaints and reports. A large number of Instagram outage reports came from Los Angeles, according to the site

“It’s always ‘Instagram is offline’, it’s never ‘Slack is offline,'” one X user posted, joking about the popular workplace communication tool

A heatmap of user complaints in the last hour and a half, compiled by DownDetector, showed clusters of reported outages for Instagram across New York; Los Angeles; and Chicago.

Many users flocked to Elon Musk’s X and to social site Reddit to see if others were experiencing problems.

“The outages are definitely getting out of hand,” said one Reddit user Posted about Instagram.

“It’s always ‘Instagram is offline’, it’s never ‘Slack is offline,'” says one X user Posteda joke about the popular means of communication in the workplace.

And, in a post on X, the official account for Meta’s said WhatsApp“We know some people are experiencing issues at the moment, we are working to get everything back to 100 percent for everyone as quickly as possible.”

Users mainly said they couldn’t send messages, but others reported they couldn’t receive them. Some users even stated that they were unable to access the apps at all.

In early March, a massive outage across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger was reportedly caused by “technical issues” – but Meta didn’t share exactly what those “issues” were.

Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms were offline for at least two and a half hours on Tuesday, March 5, leaving hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their accounts.

A Facebook insider told DailyMail.com that their internal systems were down at the time, as Meta’s service dashboard showed “major disruptions” to many of its services.

An internal issue would disable connections – similar to what happened in 2021 when all Meta platforms were down for seven hours.