WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook experienced a major outage, leaving thousands of users unable to access the popular social media platforms. The disruption, which occurred late on Wednesday, affected users across the UK and the United States, as well as in India and Brazil.

The outage, which began around 19:00 BST, resulted in approximately 82,000 issues with WhatsApp, 3,700 outages on Instagram, and 1,840 reported issues on Facebook. The technical problem also impacted around 5,000 users in the United States and peaked at 24,000 affected WhatsApp users.

Meta, the parent company of the three social media platforms, acknowledged the issues and assured users that they were working to resolve the disruptions. WhatsApp posted on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, stating, ‘We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.’

While Meta’s status site indicated that most issues have been resolved, some of its business and messaging platforms are still experiencing ‘major disruptions.’ The company has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding the outage.

In March, a similar outage impacted hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users globally for over two hours due to a technical issue. Meta, which boasts about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, including Threads, has faced previous disruptions, raising concerns about the reliability of the social media giant’s platforms.

As users eagerly awaited the restoration of services, the outage once again highlighted the extent of reliance on these platforms for communication, social interaction, and business activities. It also underscored the need for robust infrastructure and contingency plans to minimize the impact of such disruptions in the future.