new York
CNN
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Meta said on Wednesday that a technical issue is causing a widespread outage of its apps, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

“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,” Meta Newsroom said on X Wednesday afternoon.

Both WhatsApp and Instagram have confirmed outages via X and many users are reporting that they are unable to access Meta’s apps.

On the outage tracking site Downdetector, where users can report problems, Instagram had logged nearly 70,000 reports as of Wednesday afternoon. Facebook had up to 105,000 outage reports, Facebook Messenger around 14,000 and the messaging app WhatsApp around 12,500. Threads, X’s competitor, also saw an increase in outage reports. Since Downdetector is self-reported, this probably doesn’t reflect the extent of the problems.

There were several large-scale technical outages in 2024. At the end of November, a massive outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams impacted the work of office workers. And earlier this year, in what was the largest IT outage in history, CrowdStrike’s summer software problem led to air traffic shutdowns, hospital disruptions, and cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses.

Although it will not have the same impact, Meta’s platforms are very popular among social media users. The company had 3.98 billion monthly active users across its entire portfolio in 2023.