Meta has been experiencing a widespread outage across its social media and messaging apps on Wednesday, with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads all having problems loading.
Instagram has been showing error messages on the web, and the mobile app has a spinning wheel when you refresh your feed. Though Stories appear to be working on Instagram, the “following” tab has also been showing a “couldn’t load activity” message.
Instagram outage reports began spiking at around 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector, and the same time frame hit on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
“We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps,” Meta posted on X. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Outage reports have been dropping, but a refresh of our feed temporarily shows a spinning wheel, followed by posts loading that are at least four hours old.
Cisco ThousandEyes is attributing the outage to “internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate issues with Meta’s backend services.”
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on what caused the outage and when it’ll be fixed.
People took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to post about the Instagram outage, asking if others were experiencing the same loading errors and to share memes about the experience.
