WhatsApp was down in Meta's second big outage this year

Image Credits: TechCrunch

For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, and to some extent, Messenger and Instagram, faced outages and intermittent issues. While it’s rare for services as large as those operated by Meta to go down entirely, Meta’s status page detailed disruptions to key business services, including its Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API and others. WhatsApp also confirmed the outage in an update to its X account.

“We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we’re working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible,” the company shared at 2:55 p.m. ET.

We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) April 3, 2024

Users also reported issues accessing Instagram and Messenger, according to social media posts and crowdsourced reporting sites like Downdector. The latter, however, cannot serve as an official confirmation of an outage — only a signal that one could be underway. Press inquiries to Meta about the outages’ cause were not returned.

The largest trouble seems to be with WhatsApp, though some people were seeing it resolved as of the time of writing.

(In our own tests, Meta’s apps were loading and we could send messages via WhatsApp, which indicates either the outages were not global in nature or they’ve already been fixed.)

Neither Messenger, Facebook or Instagram have publicly posted a confirmation of any issues via their X accounts.

This is not the first time Meta’s apps have seen a sizable outage this year.

On Super Tuesday in the U.S. (March 5, 2024), Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down, leading users to experience error messages that “something went wrong” or they were taken to a landing page where they were logged out and couldn’t get back in. That outage lasted for a couple of hours before the apps came back online. At the time, Meta’s status page had signaled problems with products like Ads Manager as well.

Post updated after publication after the outage was resolved. According to WhatsApp, the issue was fixed by 6:19 pm ET, per a post on their X account.