On Wednesday, WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Meta Platforms (META.O) and utilized by over 3 billion individuals, was restored after an extended outage that disrupted services for thousands of users worldwide. WhatsApp announced via a post on the social media platform X that the technical issues had been resolved. At its height, the outage affected over 24,000 WhatsApp users in the United States, with Downdetector data indicating more than 5,000 Instagram users also experienced disruptions.
The company’s other popular apps, Facebook and Instagram, were largely unaffected by the issues, though users did report problems accessing those sites and its Threads microblogging platform. Facebook and WhatsApp have around 3.19 billion daily active customers, while Instagram has about 2 billion.
According to the outage-tracking website Down Detector, users began reporting issues with the apps on Wednesday morning, which saw reports of global problems. The number of reports spiked shortly after 10 a.m. ET, but they have since declined to fewer than 100 for both Facebook and Instagram.
Several Meta employees posted on the anonymous messaging app Blind that they were having trouble logging in to the company’s internal work systems. They were concerned they may have been laid off, the posts read. Elon Musk, the CEO of X, the company that owns the social media platforms, responded to the trending topics on the platform by posting: “If you’re reading this post, our servers are working.”
Facebook and Instagram later notified users that they had experienced an issue and that it was being worked on. Neither Facebook nor Instagram offered more details about the problem, which affected some of their most popular features, such as live streaming and Stories.
A Meta spokeswoman said the outages were not the result of a hacker attack. They were caused by a “network maintenance event,” she added.
During the outage, Meta’s apps weren’t available to send or receive messages, but some could still view chat history and feeds. In addition, the company’s business application programming interface, which lets companies integrate the WhatsApp service into their applications, was down.
WhatsApp’s outage was the second this year for the company, which has a reputation for stability. The largest mobile messaging app in the world, WhatsApp is known for its end-to-end encryption and voice and video calling features. In 2014, Facebook purchased it for $19.3 billion.
Metas WhatsApp has recently been expanding with features such as group conversations and a feature that lets users subscribe to channels from organizations and other people. Those channels then send updates to the subscribers’ phones. The company has also added a new privacy setting that lets users choose whether to share their phone numbers with other WhatsApp users. The feature is yet to be available in all countries.