Meta said it was near routing complete restoration after an outage disrupted access to several of its social media sites on Wednesday. The all-day glitch knocked millions around the world offline, and for much of the day, the suite of apps from Meta became unreachable for a large number of users.
Scale of the Outage
Service disruption was immense, with users taking to outage reporting sites like Downdetector. By mid-afternoon Wednesday, Instagram had more than 70,000 reports of issues, and Facebook had about 105,000. Messenger apps in use like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp reportedly counted 14,000 and 12,500 reports respectively. An apparent uptick in the number of outage reports witnessed by Threads, a Meta rival to X, was also noted.
Those figures give an idea of the scale involved, but the Downdetector statistics are crowdsourced data and so may not be the complete picture. Confirmation from Meta that work was underway didn’t come until more than three hours later. It wasn’t until 5:30 pm EST that it announced it was “99% of the way there” in restoring functionality fully.
Technical Issues in 2024
The outage is among the most significant technical disruptions of 2024, including a far-reaching Microsoft outage in November that brought down Outlook and Teams for workplace communications. Earlier this year, CrowdStrike lived through what many described as the biggest IT outage in history, sending industries like air travel and healthcare into chaos as billions of dollars were lost.
While the severity cannot be likened to the other two, the platforms of Meta have grown to become an integral part of daily digital communications. For example, by 2023, it had almost 4 billion active users of its applications every month; this, indeed, has made the platform very instrumental in connecting people across the globe.
Efforts by Meta to Address the Outage
For this, Meta did not take too long to react through the Newsroom account; first, it identified the problem. Thus, it apologized to the users for this inconvenience. It assured them of commitment to resolving this issue as early as possible.
These assurances notwithstanding, the outage upset users who have come to depend on Meta’s platforms for personal, professional, and business interactions. This incident underlines the challenges facing tech companies in keeping the services running for their huge user bases.
As Meta works its way to a full recovery, it reminds one of the reliance placed by billions on digital platforms and how even short breaks can have wide ramifications.
