Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit by a Meta outage

Meta had a bad Friday morning. A major Meta outage knocked out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for users around the world, starting shortly before 10am ET. By midday it was recovering, unevenly, region by region.

The trouble appeared to begin on WhatsApp, then spread. Facebook users were abruptly logged out, met with a “Query Error” or a “Sorry, something went wrong” message, and unable to log back in. Others could open the app but not post, comment, react, search, or load Stories and Marketplace.

What Down Detector shows

The outage-tracking site Down Detector logged a sharp spike. Facebook bore the brunt, with reports passing 130,000; Instagram logged around 9,500, and WhatsApp far fewer. Across all three, most people flagged problems with the app, then login.

Those numbers are self-reported, so they track complaints, not Meta’s own data. But the reports came in from far beyond the US, from the Philippines and Taiwan to Australia, Spain, and South Africa, which points to something central rather than a local glitch.

Businesses caught out

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It was not just scrolling. Meta’s status page logged “high disruptions” across its business products, including Facebook Ads Manager, the Messenger Platform, the Messenger API for Instagram, and the WhatsApp Business Platform. Advertisers could not create or edit ads, and Meta apologised “for any inconvenience.” On a Friday, the timing stung.

Meta confirms the disruption, but not the cause

Meta acknowledged the problems on its status page, flagging “high disruptions” and saying its engineering teams were “actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” It did not say what caused the outage, or how many users were hit.

There is no word yet on whether it was a configuration error, an infrastructure failure, or something else.

Recovery was already under way. Meta marked some services, such as ad delivery, as resolved, with others “in the process of being restored.” On the consumer side, Facebook was loading closer to normal and Down Detector reports were falling, though some users still saw an empty Stories bar, a stale feed, or a “Try Again” error.

The scale is the point: Meta’s apps reach billions, and even a couple of hours offline ripples through messaging, businesses, and logins far beyond the feed. It capped an eventful day for Meta, which this morning pledged free AI glasses to every blind US veteran. This is a developing story; we will update it with Meta’s explanation and an all-clear.