Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger, experienced widespread disruptions on Thursday, impacting users globally.
Outage reports surfaced around 2:00 a.m., with users reporting difficulties accessing platforms, logging in, and sending messages.
Meta acknowledged the technical issues affecting user access and pledged to restore services swiftly and issued an apology via X.
“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,” Meta said in the statement.
At its peak, the outage generated tens of thousands of user reports on Downdetector, peaking at almost 90,000 for Facebook around 2:30 a.m., with some users reporting limited functionality like posting and liking.
“Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99% of the way there – just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” it said around four hours later.
Network monitoring firm Cisco ThousandEyes confirmed the outage, citing internal server errors and timeouts possibly stemming from Meta’s backend services, while noting frontend web server connectivity remained unaffected.
This incident echoes a similar widespread outage in March, where over half a million users reported issues, which Meta attributed to an unspecified technical problem.
Meanwhile, OpenAI also reported a major outage affecting ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API.
The company acknowledged the issue, stating they had identified a recovery path and were working on a fix. However, services remained disrupted at the time of writing.
“We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!” said OpenAI.
The outage coincides with the launch of OpenAI’s integration with Apple’s iOS 18.2, potentially contributing to increased server load.
Some users reported ChatGPT malfunctioning within Apple Intelligence due to the downtime.
This outage occurred on day five of OpenAI’s “12 Days of Shipmas,” a holiday season event featuring daily product launches.
Previous announcements include the full release of the o1 reasoning model, a reinforcement fine-tuning research program, the release of Sora, Canvas updates, and the Apple Intelligence integration.
