Meta Speaks After Global Outage Hits WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram Users
Downdetector.com reported that over 15,000 users had issues with Facebook and more than 11,000 with Instagram a few minutes past 10 pm.
Marvin Chege 
Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, on Friday, June 16 addressed the global outage which was mass reported by social media users around the world.
WhatsApp, through its Twitter handle, was the first to acknowledge that its users encountered issues sending messages through the platform, including our team from Viral Tea.
"We’re aware some of you might be experiencing issues sending media on WhatsApp at the moment.
"We’re working to get things up and running at 100% again. We’ll keep you updated, in the meantime thanks for your patience," tweeted WhatsApp.
People using WhatsApp on their phones. /BBC
Facebook and Instagram followed suit, all promising to address the issue conclusively for the purpose of restoring normal operations.
"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," stated Facebook.
"We’re aware some of you might be experiencing issues with IG at the moment.
"We’re working to get things back to normal as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for the patience," Instagram weighed in.
Meta thereafter issued a similar statement, promising users that it was working to restore normalcy across all its applications.
Downdetector.com reported that over 15,000 users had issues with Facebook and more than 11,000 with Instagram a few minutes past 10 pm. However, normalcy was restored among some users upon inquiry by Viral Tea by the time of publishing.
It is notably not the first time all three of Meta's major apps went down at once as a similar incident occurred on October 4, 2021, which lasted approximately 7 hours and 11 minutes.
According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 6.44 pm, and are affecting users globally.
Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed at the time that there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage was feared to be affecting a larger number of users.
During the outage, many users flocked to Twitter, Discord, Signal, and Telegram, resulting in disruptions on these sites' servers. It was caused by the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which were all self-hosted at the time.
A similar issue with the three apps was recorded in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before resuming normal operations.
The July 2019 crash was linked to a “routine maintenance operation” that accidentally triggered a bug that made it difficult for users to upload or send photos and videos
“A “routine maintenance operation” accidentally triggered a bug that made it difficult for users to upload or send photos and videos,” a Facebook spokesperson told the media after the outage.
In March 2019, another outage lasting as long as 24 hours that hit Facebook services was blamed on a “server configuration change”.
The March 13 outage was believed to be the worst ever for the internet giant, which now reaches over 3 billion people with its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications.
