WhatsApp goes down in Meta’s second big outage this year

For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and possibly Messenger and Instagram, are experiencing outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services as important as those operated by Meta to go down completely, Meta’s status page details disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger platform, WhatsApp Business API and others. WhatsApp too confirmed the failure in an update of his X account.

“We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we are working to get things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible,” the company shared at 2:55 p.m. ET.

Users are also reporting problems accessing Instagram and Messenger, according to social media posts and crowdsourced reporting sites like Downdector. However, this cannot serve as official confirmation of an outage – only a signal that an outage may be in progress. Press inquiries to Meta regarding the cause of the outages have not yet been returned.

The biggest problem seems to be with WhatsApp, although some people see it resolved at the time of writing.

(In our own testing, Meta’s apps loaded and we could send messages via WhatsApp, indicating that either the outages were not global in nature or have already been fixed.)

Neither Messenger, Facebook nor Instagram have publicly posted confirmation of issues through their X accounts.

This isn’t the first time Meta’s apps have suffered a major outage this year.

On Super Tuesday in the United States (March 5, 2024), Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down, causing users to receive error messages stating that “something went wrong” or that ‘They were redirected to a landing page where they were logged out and could not return. This outage lasted a few hours before the applications came back online. At the time, Meta’s status page also reported issues with products like Ads Manager.