Users of Meta-controlled social media applications have been shut out globally as the company grapples with a “technical issue”
Frustrated Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users trooped out to X on Wednesday to report the global outage of the three apps owned by tech giant Mark Zuckerberg.
Downdetector also showed big spikes for Instagram with 70,000 outage reports above average and Facebook, which had over 100,000 outage reports.
“We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps,” Meta said in an X post. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Facebook suffered a similar outage in May 2024 and in October 2021 which was attributed to technical issues, not a security hack as originally feared.
Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password. On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with three billion active monthly users.
Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.
X saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.
According to Statista, as of 2021, Nigeria had about 33 million active social media users with WhatsApp being the most popular platform used in the country, with over 90 million users.
About 61.4 per cent of Nigerian social media users use X, 86.2 per cent use Facebook, 81.6 per cent use YouTube, 73.1 per cent use Instagram, and 67.2 per cent use Facebook Messenger.
WhatsApp also wrote on X: “We’re aware of some issues accessing WhatsApp. We’re actively working on a solution and starting to see a return to normal for most people. We expect things to be back to normal shortly”.
In April, WhatsApp experienced a global outage that lasted minutes.
Similarly, on March 5, millions of users complained about logging errors while accessing the social media platforms.
The Meta-controlled social media applications had suffered a similar multiple-service outage in October 2021.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a global outage that lasted about six hours.
The platforms also experienced glitches globally in March of that same year
In 2019, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were hit by a three-hour outage which prevented some users from accessing the platforms.
It was recently reported that 3.29 billion people used at least one of Meta’s core products daily.
