Meta services are back online following a shorter global outage than last month

Meta is a social media giant, well known as the parent company of arguably the most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Each of these apps alone sees millions of active users every day, if not billions. Unfortunately, though, most Meta services faced a worldwide outage.

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Downdetector reports peaked at 2:12 p.m. ET, showing a massive spike in problems loading WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Even WhatsApp Business was unavailable. Attempts to access WhatsApp Web and the Instagram website simply resulted in a “service unavailable” error. Although such outages are a rarity, especially for brands like Meta, this isn’t the company’s first massive outage this year. A similar brand-wide disruption was recorded just last month, when these popular social media apps were inaccessible for an entire hour.

A short outage is concerning, nonetheless

Reports from users of the affected apps plateaued and then subsided at around 2:42 pm ET, indicating this outage lasted approximately 30 minutes, which is half as long as the one in March. However, unavailability and unreliable performance deal heavy blows to a brand’s image, and sends users flocking in droves to rival platforms like X (formerly Twitter).

X CEO Elon Musk didn’t spare the opportunity to poke fun at Meta’s outage last month. Although he didn’t remark on the latest incident (yet), hashtags such as #whatsappdown and #instagramdown immediately started trending on X in India and the US.

Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, was quick to acknowledge the March outage on X. However, Meta hasn’t provided an explanation for this month’s unannounced interruption in its services yet. We just hope this doesn’t become a regular affair.