On April 3, 2024, a widespread outage affected major social media platforms WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, impacting thousands of users globally. The owner of these platforms, the technology conglomerate Meta, encountered technical difficulties that disrupted the normal functioning of these apps, according to user reports and information from Meta’s status site.

The issue was first brought to attention by Downdetector, a UK-based service that tracks website outages, which noted a significant surge in complaints from users unable to access WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. The problem was not confined to the UK; in the United States, Instagram users also reported difficulties, and the outage extended to other countries, including India and Brazil, underscoring the global scale of the incident.

WhatsApp, one of the affected platforms, publicly recognised the disruptions and assured users of efforts to rectify the problem promptly. Despite the wide reach and reliance on Meta’s platforms, which boast a daily active user base of 3.19 billion, the company had not issued a statement regarding the outage at the time of reporting.

Notably, this is not an isolated instance of technical problems for Meta’s services. A previous incident in March saw Facebook and Instagram going offline for over two hours due to technical glitches, pointing to recurring challenges with maintaining uninterrupted service for the vast number of users who depend on these platforms for communication and social interaction.