Meta Platforms said on Friday that services on its social media apps Facebook and Instagram have been restored, more than two hours after an outage that affected thousands of users.
At one point, nearly 20,000 total users said they were having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram and Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
Meta announced on Twitter that it is working to resolve the issues, shortly after reports of outages began to emerge.
We know that some of you might be experiencing issues with our apps today.
We are working to get things back to normal as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. 🙏
—Meta (@Meta) June 16, 2023
Blackout reports were down to fewer than 500 as of 6:30 p.m. ET (4:00 a.m. IST, Saturday), according to Downdetector.
Downdetector keeps track of outages by collecting status reports from various sources, including user-submitted bugs on your platform. The outage may be affecting a larger number of users.
Issues with Meta’s Ads Manager, the advertising tool that lets brands buy and create Facebook ads, have also been resolved, the company said.
Fixed! The issue is resolved and everything should be working normally again in all of our apps. Thanks again for your patience.
—Meta (@Meta) June 16, 2023
However, the outage problems were not global. In India, Facebook and Instagram were working fine for most users.
In other news, Meta recently reversed a policy that was put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19-related misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter came under enormous pressure to address pandemic-related misinformation, including false claims about vaccines, prompting them to crack down.
In July of last year, Facebook’s parent sought input from its independent oversight board on changes to its current approach, given the improvement in authentic sources of information and general awareness of COVID.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
