Meta apologizes for the 'technical issue' that caused massive crash of Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp in several countries

This Wednesday, users of Facebook, Instagram and other Meta applications experienced a significant crash, which generated access and operation problems in various parts of the world. Thousands of people reported outages on these platforms, causing frustration among users.

DownDetector data

According to DownDetector data, as of 1:10 p.m. ET, more than 100,000 reports of outages of Facebook's service were recorded in the United States alone, while nearly 20,000 problems were reported in Canada. In addition, more than 70,000 US Instagram users reported glitches, and another 12,400 in Canada experienced similar outages. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, was not exempt, with more than 4,000 reports in Canada and another 12,000 in the United States.

Several countries in the Americas, including Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil, also faced service outages, and in Europe, key Meta nations such as Spain, France and the UK also recorded platform failures.

Meta's response to the outages

Meta reacted quickly to the situation and, through a post on its official X account at 1:55 p.m., indicated that it was aware of the "technical issue" that was preventing some users from accessing its applications. The company promised to work to restore the service as soon as possible and apologized for the inconvenience caused, although it did not provide an estimated time for full resolution of the problem.

Previous history of failures

Although reports of failures began to subside around 1:30 p.m. ET, this is not the first time in 2024 that Meta applications have experienced such problems. In April, an outage on WhatsApp affected more than 9,000 users in Canada and 22,000 in the United States.