Social media sites including Facebook suffer global outage

Meta-owned social media sites including Facebook, Instagram and Threads experienced worldwide outages on Wednesday night, with users unable to access the apps.

The global tech giant has confirmed the disruption, saying: "We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." 

"We’re aware of some issues accessing WhatsApp. We’re actively working on a solution and starting to see a return to normal for most people. We expect things to be back to normal shortly," said the messaging app on X.

Downdetector.com — which tracks real-time overview of issues and outages of websites and social platforms — showed that nearly 1,000 users in Pakistan reported disruption at around 11pm.

Users also complained about having issues with WhatsApp with 2,259 being registered by Downdetector since 10:52pm. Both social media apps are operated by Meta.

Instagram, also owned by Meta, saw numerous reported disruptions around the same time frame today. According to the Downdetector website, there were more than 1,200 outage reports since 10:52pm.

 

Some Facebook and Instagram users posted on rival platform X that they were encountering an error that said "something went wrong" and that Meta was working to get it fixed.

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were impacted globally for more than two hours early this year by an outage that was caused by a technical issue.

The platforms faced another outage in October when services were largely restored within an hour. 

This is a developing story and is being updated with further details.