Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down for millions

Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp just went down for millions of users worldwide.

Meta hit a major snag earlier today (Friday 12 June) with all three of its major platforms going down simultaneously, leaving millions of users unable to access their accounts.

Reports of issues began flooding in around 9.30 am (EST), with Downdetector, a major tracking website that collects information on outages, registering a sharp spike in complaints across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger almost simultaneously. By 9.47 am, Downdetector had logged around 123,864 reports of issues with Facebook.

The issue affected social media users worldwide with reports flooding in from Philippines, Canada, the United States, Australia, India, according to Downforeveryoneorjustme.

Approximately 21,000 users had flagged issues, with 'inaccessible' and 'error received' being the most commonly reported problems.

Many Facebook users were met with a message reading 'this page isn't available right now' when attempting to log in and that the company is 'working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can.' Meanwhile, Instagram pages on the app simply refused to load and WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were similarly affected. On the comments section on Down Detector, one user wrote that they were met with a 'blank page' while another said they were 'kicked off' the login page and unable to sign back in.

Thankfully, the outage appears to have been a brief one as the Meta apps are back up and running, with no further issues reported. Although Meta has not publicly addressed the outage at the time of writing, leaving users without an explanation as to what happened.

Even though the platforms were only down for less than an hour, the reaction on X was almost instant, with users taking to the platform to confirm they were not alone.

"Everyone arriving on X to check if Facebook and Instagram are down… 👀🍿“Yep… it’s not just me.” 😂" one user wrote.

Another user commented: "facebook is down AGAIN and every time this happens i remember how much of my life is stored on that app. anyway hi X @elonmusk"

A third user added: "Is everyone having problems with Facebook and Instagram or Meta in general???"

A panicked fourth user posted: "Did anyone else get a panic attack when they tried opening Facebook and it wouldn't open? It was having a technical glitch, and I honestly thought my account had been hacked. Thankfully, it's been restored now."

Other users posted jokes and memes about the situation, showing everyone migrating to X the moment the outage occurred.

This is a breaking story, more to follow.