Users of Meta-controlled social media applications have been shut out globally as the company grapples with a “technical issue”
Frustrated Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users trooped out to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday evening to report the global outage of the three apps owned by tech giant Mark Zuckerberg.
Downdetector also showed big spikes for Instagram with 70,000 outage reports above average and Facebook, which had over 100,000 outage reports.
“We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps,” Meta said in an X post. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Facebook suffered a similar outage in May 2024 and in October 2021 which was attributed to technical issues, not a security hack as originally feared.
Users trying to access Facebook were asked to log in but were unable to sign in using the correct password. On Instagram, mobile users were seeing their feeds not refreshed.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with three billion active monthly users.
Instagram has about 1.35 billion users, according to the latest data.
X, formerly Twitter, saw a spike in online activity as users were locked out of the Meta sites.
According to Statista, as of 2021, Nigeria had about 33 million active social media users with WhatsApp being the most popular platform used in the country, with over 90 million users.
About 61.4 per cent of Nigerian social media users use X, 86.2 per cent use Facebook, 81.6 per cent use YouTube, 73.1 per cent use Instagram, and 67.2 per cent use Facebook Messenger.
