Tech company Meta recently experienced a massive outage that affected the functioning of its apps, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This has made many netizens and social media users curious about the situation and wonder why Facebook and other social media applications went down.
Here is what we have learned about the situation.
Why was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down?
The exact reason for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s outage is unknown. This is because Meta did not offer one.
However, as per an analysis from Cisco’s ThousandEyes, a security company. The outage issues were caused by problems with Meta’s backend services, which in turn caused internal server errors and timeouts.
As of this writing, the issues have been resolved, and the platforms appear to function normally.
The issues reportedly first began sometime around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time ran until 2:30 p.m. Users complained about problems like error messages and stories not loading correctly or getting sent.
Meta eventually responded via X (Twitter), where they called it a “technical issue” and stated they were working to get things to function as usual. However, they did not elaborate on the problem.
Several users made jokes at Meta’s expense about the power outage, bringing up their use of a rival company’s social media platform to address it.
Meta later put up a follow-up tweet confirming they were almost done fixing the issue.
Instagram also posted on X to reaffirm that they were working on fixing the issue. They later informed the users that the app’s functioning was back to normal. However, like Meta, Instagram also did not offer an explanation about why their app and its sister apps, Facebook and WhatsApp, went down.
This is not the first time in the year that the social media apps have experienced an outage, as there was previously a two-hour outage earlier this year in March.
