All of Meta Platform’s social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, have been reported down for tens of thousands of users on Monday afternoon.
Facebook users in the US first began reporting problems with the service at about 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, according to internet monitoring site Downdetector.com.
At its peak, a Downdetector graph showed close to 110,00 users impacted, with over half of those users having problems with the Facebook app, and another third having issues loading Facebook on the web.
"I couldn't even log out of Facebook. It's not completely down. It's just unusable," one Facebook user posted on X.
Another X user posted, "Instagram's feed and story functions are not working. And Whatsapp is entirely down, no messaging whatsoever."
On Instagram, just over 71,000 US users reported outages, while roughly 12,000 more said they were having problems sending messages using Meta’s WhatsApp encrypted messaging service.
“Hi, we know there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram,” the Zuckerberg-run media platform posted to X users at about 2:00 p.m. ET. Meta's X profile posted a similar message within minutes.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience,” the posts said.
Hi, we know there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram.
undefined Instagram (@instagram) December 11, 2024
We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience.#instagramdown
Similar tallies of affected users were found across Europe, with about 83k Finnish users experiencing outages on Facebook and Instagram and another 25k users impacted in the UK.
Facebook Messenger was also out for about 14 thousand reported users in the US with 44% being unable to login to the service and 38% having issues sending messages.
It’s not clear what caused the outage, but impacted user numbers began dwindling throughout the hour, leaving just over 20K still out in the US by 2:30 p.m.
"Technical issues" costly for Meta
The last major Meta outage impacting about 600,000 users took place on March 5th, 2024 lasting about 2 hours.
Facebook, Instagram (and a handful of Threads) users were automatically logged out or prevented from accessing the social media sites altogether.
Even with correct usernames and passwords, users were met with an “incorrect password” message, sparking fears of a hacking event. Meta blamed the outage on “technical issues.”
The worldwide outage caused Meta’s share price to fall that day by 1.5 percent, allegedly costing the company (or at least Mark Zuckerberg) an estimated “$100 million in revenue,” said Managing Director of Wedbush Securities Dan Ives at the time.
Still, “this is a negligible amount of revenue,” Ives told the Daily Mail, which noted that Meta's annual revenue was clocked at about $134 billion in 2023.
The social media sites faced another outage in October, although services were largely restored within an hour.
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