Facebook and Instagram users reported widespread outages on Wednesday. The users were unable to log in or load chat and comment histories on Instagram, and Messenger, Workplace Chat and Instagram DMs also failed to load.
Data from DownDetector.com showed users began reporting issues with Instagram and Facebook around 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, growing to thousands of reports by 3:30 p.m. Now, some of the issues are slowly being resolved but reports of problems are still widespread.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Messenger, Workplace Chat and Instagram DMs,” a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of the social media platforms, said in a statement. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Instagram also apologized for the inconvenience, saying it was “aware some of you are having trouble accessing our messaging apps at the moment” and was “working to fix things as quickly as possible.”
The outages come only one week after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would undergo a corporate name change to “Meta.” The new name is meant to emphasize the brand’s vision and focus on the three- dimensional virtual space called the metaverse.
“From now on we are going to be Metaverse first, not Facebook,” Zuckerberg said last Thursday. “I hope that people come to know the Meta brand and the future that we stand for.”
Earlier in October, the websites experienced two outages in one week. Representatives for Facebook blamed the first outage on a networking issue that disabled proper communication between internal technology. The second outage, which Facebook said was not related to the first, was blamed on a “configuration change,” according to the company.
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