Meta’s social media and messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, faced significant technical disruptions on Wednesday, leaving thousands of users unable to access services for hours, Khaleej Times reported.
The outage, which began around 12:50 PM ET (9:50 PM UAE time), saw over 2,600 users in the UAE reporting issues with WhatsApp and more than 2,000 experiencing problems on Instagram, according to Downdetector.com. At its peak, over 12,000 incidents were logged globally for WhatsApp alone.
Users reported difficulties in sending messages on WhatsApp, as well as loading posts and content on Facebook and Instagram. Many turned to X (formerly Twitter) to vent frustrations and share memes about the situation.
Meta acknowledged the issue in a statement on X, expressing regret for the inconvenience caused. “Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99 percent of the way there – just doing some last checks. We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” the company tweeted at 2:26 AM UAE time.
Services were gradually restored about 4.5 hours after the outage began. Meta assured users that it worked diligently to resolve the problem and was taking measures to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
This is not the first time Meta has faced widespread outages. Earlier this year, another technical issue caused a global disruption lasting more than two hours, and a separate incident in October left users offline for about an hour.
