Following over 100,000 complaints, the social media company apologised to individuals impacted by the blackout on Wednesday.
According to Meta, it is “99% of the way there” in resolving a social media blackout that affected its apps and resulted in problems with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Downdetector, a monitoring website, reported 23,445 Facebook outage reports, 11,466 Instagram outage reports, and 18,646 WhatsApp outage reports across Britain at around 10 p.m. GMT on Wednesday. In the US, however, all three sites appeared to be completely unaffected.
At 10.26 p.m., Meta posted an update on X stating that the issue was almost fixed. A representative said: “We appreciate your patience! We’re just making a few final checks, but we’re 99 percent there. We sincerely regret to everyone impacted by the outage.
Earlier in the evening, Downdetector displayed significant increases in issues for Facebook users and further Meta applications. Around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Facebook disruptions were first detected, and over 100,000 complaints were filed in the US and the UK.
Similar complaints were being made about Instagram and WhatsApp, which prevented users worldwide from sending or receiving messages.
The outages paled in comparison to Facebook’s 2021 outage, in which the firm unintentionally erased its own address from the systems that enable servers to communicate with one another over the internet due to a setup error in a little-known protocol called BGP.
The company’s engineers were unable to remotely access their own servers to fix the issue, and they were unable to use their corporate passes to bypass the electronic locks and obtain physical access, so even though the error was discovered right away, it took several hours for the fix to be implemented and take effect.
However, this is not the first time that global disruptions have affected Meta services this year. Globally, Facebook and Instagram encountered serious problems in March, with feed slowing and the services rejecting login attempts.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” Meta said in a statement posted on its social network, Threads. We apologies for any inconvenience caused and worked to rectify the matter as soon as possible.
