Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Business Services Suffer Outages

Instagram and WhatsApp reportedly suffered some outages in the United States and some other countries Wednesday (April 3).

For a period of time Wednesday afternoon, Eastern time, Downdetector displayed 3,100 users’ reports of outages for Instagram and 17,000 for WhatsApp, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

A status page of Meta Platforms, the parent company of both Instagram and WhatsApp, said at the time that there were “major disruptions” in its ads transparency tools, according to the report.

Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment on this and other media reports of outages on its platforms.

WhatsApp addressed the issue on the social media platform X, saying in a Wednesday afternoon post: “We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible.”

About three hours later, WhatsApp followed up with a post: “And we’re back. Happy chatting!”

WhatsApp’s outage affected thousands of people globally and lasted for hours before being restored, Reuters reported Wednesday.

In addition to those in the U.S., there were reports of outages by users in India, the United Kingdom and Brazil, the report said, citing data from Downdetector.

TechCrunch reported Wednesday that Meta’s status page showed disruptions to its Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API and other business services.

Meta’s app suffered an outage a month earlier, on March 5, when Facebook, Instagram and Threads were down for a couple of hours, according to the report.

At that time, users got error messages saying that “something went wrong” or were logged out and unable to log back in, the report said.

The Verge reported Wednesday that there were also user reports of problems with the Meta platforms Facebook and Threads on Wednesday. Any issues there were resolved later in the day, the report said.

While WhatsApp was affected by Wednesday’s reported outage, it was not impacted by the one that affected some other Meta platforms in March, according to the report. WhatsApp’s last major outage was in 2022, when it was offline for two hours.

When Facebook experienced a 22-hour partial outage in 2019, PYMNTS reported that retailers, service providers and influencers were among those who “likely had a rough day.”