MELBOURNE: A major outage is affecting users of popular social media and messaging services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around the globe. All these platforms are run by the social media giant Meta. As news of the outage spread, we learned that it affected almost all of Meta's products, including Messenger and Threads, as well as Meta's business products, such as Facebook Ads Manager and the Messenger API for Instagram.
Most services are beginning to come back online. But what went wrong, and what can we learn from this massive outage? The scope of the outage Outages have been reported from the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States and beyond. The outage was first reported in the US on Wednesday (around 12.
30pm in New York, 5.30pm in London, or 4.30am Thursday in Sydney).
Five hours later, Meta posted to X to say it was 99 per cent of the way to resolving the outage. What might have caused it? At the moment, there has been no official word on the cause of the outage. However, we can make some educated guesses based on its scope.
From reporting so far, the outage covered not only Meta's major social media platforms and messaging services, but also some of its business products. It also affected Meta's Login with Facebook service, which allows users to log in to third-party sites using their Facebook username and password. In other words, there seem to be very few Meta products this outage did not impact.
That suggests that whatever went wrong was a single.
