A major outage at parent company Meta has brought down social media platforms WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
The outage which was on Wednesday began around 18:00 BST (14:00 EST) and was however brief as thousands of the apps users had issues with the three sites late in the day.
It was around 4:00 p.m. Nigerian time, and the reason for the development or when it will be fixed was not stated.
Confused users of the apps aired their frustration on other social media.
Meta said later on that the outage had been resolved.
According to Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, on his official X handle at 4:25 p.m. announced that the platforms’ blackout but promised that it was being worked on.
Stone said, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
Thousand users of the three platforms said they abruptly logged out of their accounts and receiving a “session expired” or “password incorrect” notification.
The outage made many users to resort to a rival platform, X.
In 2022, WhatsApp experienced a worldwide outage.
The BBC reports that the UK site Downdetector, which monitors the performance of websites, indicated around 82,000 issues with WhatsApp at 18:25 but an hour later the issue appeared to have been largely resolved.
Users on Instagram reported around 3,700 outages at 18:20, with numbers persisting for a couple of hours.
Similarly, Facebook users advised of issues at the same time with 1,840 outages reported at 18:23.
The technical problem was not confined to the UK – Reuters news agency reported that about 5,000 people faced issues with Instagram in the United States. At its peak, around 24,000 WhatsApp users also experienced problems.
WhatsApp said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.”
Nearly 3,500 users in India and more than 7,000 in Brazil also reported problems with the platform, according to Downdetector.
In March, hundreds of thousands of users of the social media company’s Facebook and Instagram were impacted globally for more than two hours following an outage caused by technical issue.
Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes Threads
