Meta said it had suffered a global outage, with some users experiencing problems using social media apps Instagram and Facebook, as well as messaging service WhatsApp.

In a statement posted on X, Meta said: “We are aware that a technical issue is affecting some users’ access to our apps. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”

Downdetector, a website that monitors problems with websites and apps, saw large spikes in problems among users of Facebook and other meta apps. Facebook outages were first reported around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, with more than 100,000 complaints recorded.

Instagram and WhatsApp also faced similar complaints as users were unable to send or receive messages.

The outages are unlikely to be as severe as Facebook’s outage in 2021, when a configuration error in a little-known protocol called BGP caused the company to accidentally delete its own address from the systems that allow servers to to communicate with each other on the Internet.

Although this flaw was discovered immediately, it took several hours for the fix to be implemented and take effect – in part because the company’s engineers were no longer able to gain remote access to their own servers to resolve the issue; They also couldn’t use their company IDs to get through the electronic locks and gain physical access.

However, this is not the first time this year that meta services have been affected by global outages. In March, Facebook and Instagram experienced serious issues worldwide as the services rejected login attempts and feeds stalled.

Meta said in a statement on its social network Threads at the time: “Earlier today, a technical issue resulted in people having difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”