Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp Restored After Global Outage

Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, the social media apps owned by Meta Platforms, experienced a temporary outage on Monday, according to Downdetector. The outage lasted for over an hour and affected thousands of users. Instagram had the highest number of reported issues, with over 14,000 users facing difficulties accessing the platform. 

Facebook and WhatsApp also experienced disruptions, with around 7,000 and 2,700 users reporting problems, respectively. Even Meta’s latest app, Threads, faced an outage, with approximately 470 users encountering issues accessing the app.

Downdetector, a service that monitors outages by gathering status reports from various sources, including user-submitted error reports, indicated that the outage discussed in the previous article could have impacted a larger user base. While the reported numbers reflect the users who reported issues, it is possible that a greater number of individuals were affected by the outage.

Meta did not provide an immediate response to a query from Reuters regarding the outages experienced. Additionally, during an Australian inquiry on foreign interference, a Meta executive revealed that the company intends to designate government-affiliated accounts on its Twitter-like platform Threads.

During a Senate inquiry on foreign interference, Josh Machin, Meta’s head of public policy for Australia, stated that Meta plans to implement labels for government-affiliated accounts on its Twitter-like platform Threads. Machin mentioned that areas such as labeling state-affiliated media and fact-checking are areas of value and the company aims to develop them quickly. This disclosure comes shortly after the launch of Threads, which is considered similar to Twitter.

Twitter had removed tags from government-affiliated accounts since Elon Musk took it private in 2022, which resulted in complaints regarding the impact on users’ media literacy.

July 11, 2023