Global Outage Hits Meta Platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Down

On Wednesday, December 11, 2024, the world’s users suffered a significant outage in Meta’s popular platforms, which include Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

The outage began around 12:50 PM ET and lasted for over two hours, bringing most social media activity and communication to a halt.

The outage was reported globally with the majority of complaints coming from the United States. Over 105,000 users have complained about Facebook, while around 70,000 complaints were filed on Instagram. WhatsApp also has faced disruptions with more than 12,000 people reporting difficulties in accessing it.

Users trying to access Facebook and Instagram received error messages that said, “Something went wrong,” while WhatsApp users were unable to send and receive messages.

The outage impacted different functionalities, ranging from complete inaccessibility to slow loading times and posting errors.

Meta has admitted to the problem, adding that the team is already working to solve the issue as soon as possible. “We know some people are having trouble connecting to WhatsApp. We are working on resolving this quickly and starting to see most people recover“.

We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.

— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) December 11, 2024

Meta has provided no explanations about the cause of the outage.

Businesses that use Meta’s platforms for promotion and engaging customers had a hard time during the outage. Families and individuals who use WhatsApp to talk to each other were also hurt, which showed how much people depend on these sites for business and socializing.

This is the most recent time Meta has been down in the last few years. For almost six hours in 2021, there was a very important failure. Several things went wrong during the outage, which experts believe points to a single weak spot in Meta’s network. This highlights the need for better system design and problem isolation.

Users are frustrated and looking for information about the outage on other platforms while Meta tries to restore services and stop this from happening again. This outage is a good lesson of how important it is to have a reliable system and how hard it can be for big tech companies to keep services running without any problems.