Kampala, Uganda | By Michael Wandati | WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram experienced a momentary blackout due to a significant outage within Meta, their parent company.
Late Wednesday 3, April 2024, numerous users worldwide encountered difficulties accessing these platforms, prompting them to express their frustrations on alternative social media channels.
Although Meta’s status page suggests that most issues have been resolved, certain business and messaging services continue to face notable disruptions.
Problems started around 21:00 East Africa Time (EAT).
According to the UK-based site downdetector.com, which tracks website performance, there were approximately 82,000 problems with WhatsApp at 21:23 EAT. However, an hour later, the situation seemed to have largely improved.
Instagram users reported around 3,700 outages at 21:20 EAT, with issues persisting for a couple of hours.
Likewise, Facebook users encountered problems at the same time, with 1,840 outages reported at 21:23 EAT.
The technical glitch wasn’t limited to the UK. Reuters disclosed that approximately 5,000 individuals in the United States were also encountering Instagram issues. At its peak, around 24,000 WhatsApp users faced problems.
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WhatsApp acknowledged the issue on 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.”
According to Downdetector, nearly 3,500 users in India and over 7,000 in Brazil reported platform problems.
Neither Messenger, Facebook or Instagram have publicly posted a confirmation of any issues via their X accounts.
This is not the first time Meta’s apps have seen a sizable outage this year.
On March 5, 2024, Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down, leading users to experience error messages that “something went wrong” or they were taken to a landing page where they were logged out and couldn’t get back in.
That outage lasted for a couple of hours before the apps came back online. At the time, Meta’s status page had signaled problems with products like Ads Manager as well.
Meta’s family of apps, which includes Threads, boasts approximately 3.19 billion daily active users.
Post updated after publication after the outage was resolved. According to WhatsApp, the issue was fixed by 1:19 AM EAT, per a post on their X account.
