Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for millions of users across the UK, Europe, and the United States on Wednesday afternoon, as Meta suffered a widespread technical outage affecting all three of its major platforms.
The disruption began around 1:00 pm GMT, according to the outage tracking website Down Detector, which recorded an unprecedented spike in user reports just before the hour across all Meta owned services.
Affected users reported being logged out of their accounts, receiving messages stating their account was temporarily unavailable, and being unable to refresh feeds or send messages.
Meta has not confirmed the cause of the outage.
Cybersecurity analysts have pointed to a possible DNS failure, a breakdown in the system that translates domain names into IP addresses, which would prevent users devices from connecting to Meta servers.
Other possible causes include an internal server configuration error during maintenance, a simultaneous failure of backend infrastructure across platforms, a Border Gateway Protocol routing error, or a cyber attack.
The scale of the disruption has drawn comparisons to the October 2021 outage that took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline for nearly six hours and cost Meta an estimated $100 million.
