WhatsApp goes down in Meta’s second big outage this year

For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps including WhatsApp, and possibly Messenger and Instagram, are facing outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services as large as those operated by Meta to go down entirely, Meta’s status page details disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API, and others. WhatsApp also confirmed the outage in an update to its X account.

“We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible,” the company shared at 2:55 PM ET.

Users are also reporting issues accessing Instagram and Messenger, according to social media posts and crowdsourced reporting sites like Downdector. However, the latter cannot serve as an official confirmation of an outage — only a signal that one could be underway. Press inquiries to Meta about the outages’ cause have not yet been returned.

The largest trouble seems to be with WhatsApp, though some people are seeing it resolved as of the time of writing.

(In our own tests, Meta’s apps were loading and we could send messages via WhatsApp which indicates either the outages were not global in nature or they’ve already been fixed.)

Neither Messenger, Facebook nor 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 Super Tuesday in the U.S. (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.