Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads on Wednesday were all experiencing issues to varying degrees as a result of a global outage affecting Meta's apps. The cause of the outage is not yet known, but Meta has acknowledged a "technical issue" in a post on X.

The company at 1:48 p.m. ET wrote, "We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

Instagram posted a similar message on X, along with the hashtag #instagramdown for visibility.

WhatsApp additionally confirmed its own issues but said it was working on a solution and "starting to see a return to normal for most people," as of 1:49 PM ET.

According to anecdotal reports, including user posts on X and Bluesky and downtime tracking websites like Downdetector, the outage began sometime around 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday. While typically Downdector sees an average of 16 user reports per hour regarding Facebook issues, it spiked around 1 p.m. to over 97,000 reports. Instagram, meanwhile, spiked with north of 67,000 reports.

While the website doesn't offer actual measurements around outages, it can help to offer some visibility into who's affected and how long outages have been ongoing.

In addition to user reports of the outages, Meta's status page for its business products shows some disruptions as well. This includes "major disruptions" of the Facebook Ads Manager, as well as issues with Workplace from Meta, which is currently "recovering from disruptions." The APIs for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram are also showing "major disruptions."

Meta has been asked for further comment.

The tech giant has had other significant outages this year, including another impacting multiple apps on Super Tuesday in March in the U.S., and one impacting WhatsApp and, to some extent, other apps in April.

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/meta-apps-experience-global-outage/