A massive outage broke across the Meta’s Family of Apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, on Wednesday night, with users reporting issues globally on X. In India, Downdetector recorded over 30,376 reports for Instagram outages, particularly in Tier-1 cities like Mumbai and Bangalore, while 31,000 users reported problems with WhatsApp messaging. In contrast, Facebook saw just over 5,000 reports.

Meta acknowledged the disruption, stating, "We’re aware of a technical issue impacting some users’ ability to access our apps and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible." Services were largely restored, with Meta posting updates on X, apologising for the inconvenience and confirming progress toward full resolution. However, Meta took over two hours to restore the issue.

Hundreds of thousands of users were affected globally due to this blackout and a slew of memes started pouring in across the alternatives of Meta FoAs. During the outage, users were unable to send messages, make calls, or use the Status feature. Although Meta cited a "technical error" as the cause, no detailed explanation has been provided yet.

As per the February annual report of Meta, its Family of Apps reported 3.19 billion daily active users globally in December 2023. The outage yesterday highlighted Meta’s need to refocus towards building a robust infrastructure to sustain its vast user base.

Meta has experienced numerous outages across its products — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — over the years. These outages, some of which were widespread, have disrupted millions of users globally.

This is the third time any of the Meta apps have faced blackout in 2024

Historical data reveals a pattern of recurring outages, and the frequency of outages appears to have stagnated if not exactly increased over time. By comparison, the number of outages this year has surpassed those of the previous year, with significant incidents reported in December, April, and March.

On March 5, 2024, over 11.1 million users worldwide reported issues with Facebook, making it the largest outage recorded. This incident also affected Instagram, generating over 908,000 user reports in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Downdetector by Ookla. Within the next month, another major outage was seen on WhatsApp.

In April 2023, WhatsApp experienced a blackout impacting over 22,000 users worldwide. Similarly, in 2022, WhatsApp alone experienced two significant disruptions in April and October. In October 2021, Meta faced two major outages in a single week, causing services across its biggest platforms to crash. Earlier in March 2021, another outage affected WhatsApp and Instagram, leading to a 45-minute downtime. In 2020, WhatsApp faced four outages, including a three-hour disruption in January. The most prolonged outage in Meta's history occurred in 2019, lasting an entire day.

Social media outages are often caused by technical errors, such as changes to internet infrastructure or issues with domain names, as well as cyberattacks. The 2021 outage, for example, stemmed from configuration changes in Meta’s backbone routers, disrupting network traffic and severely impacting data centre communication.