Three apps under Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms experienced outages, with affected people unable to use or access them. Services for the said apps were later restored.
According to the Daily Mail, three Meta apps – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – were affected by the outages. It noted that reports of problems with the apps on the Downdetector website began to surface on the afternoon of June 16. Instagram users in New York City and Los Angeles were among the hardest hit, the Mail added.
Tens of thousands of outage reports at Downdetector came in from users across the continental United States. Thousands of users in various countries – including Mexico, Colombia, Germany and the United Kingdom – also reported outages on WhatsApp.
Some affected users said they were unable to send messages, while others reported being unable to receive them. Even worse, some declared they could not access the apps at all.
Jason Buckley, a digital marketing strategist, reported on Twitter that "photo galleries have poofed" – insinuating that some pictures uploaded on Meta apps may have vanished.
While the glitches appear to have been resolved, Meta did not disclose any potential reason for them. The Examiner later reported that outage reports had come down to less than 500 as of the evening of June 16.
"Our engineering teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," the Big Tech company helmed by Zuckerberg said in a statement. "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." Issues with the Ad Manager, which lets brands buy and create ads on Facebook, were also reportedly resolved.
Meta apps also hit with outages in January
The recent glitches came five months after similar outages hit Meta apps in January. (Related: Facebook's outage shows how easily society can collapse because of its overreliance on Big Tech platforms.)
A Jan. 26 report by Philippine media outlet Rappler said several Meta apps were briefly rendered inaccessible. Downdetector recorded more than 13,000 incidents for the Facebook app in the U.S. and 17,000 incidents for Instagram. WhatsApp and Messenger were also reportedly affected by the glitch.
"Outages of Big Tech platforms are not uncommon, as several companies ranging from Alphabet Inc.'s Google to Microsoft Corp. have seen service disruptions," the Rappler report said. It added that Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and that service was eventually restored.
Reuters also reported in October of last year that several Meta users were unable to access their apps. The issue, according to the company, was due to a "configuration change" that was quickly fixed.
The issue affected more than 11,000 users across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. According to Downdetector, the problems mainly centered on accessing the apps, sending messages and logging into accounts. "A configuration change caused some people to have trouble accessing our products," a spokesperson for Meta said at the time.
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