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UPDATE 2 p.m. ET: YouTube says the loading issues have now been fixed, but it did not provide details on what caused them in the first place.
Original Story:Meta this morning confirmed widespread outages affecting Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. YouTube is reporting similar trouble.
"We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now," Meta Communications Director Andy Stone said in a post on X this morning. Just after noon ET, he posted an update that blamed a "technical issue" without elaborating.
"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Stone added.
YouTube, meanwhile, also acknowledged "loading issues" on its own X feed. "Will follow up here once things are back to normal," it wrote around 11:30 a.m. ET.
One X employee responded to Stone's post with: "No need," while the main @X account quipped: "We know why you're all here [right now]."
News of Facebook and Instagram's outage quickly spread across Twitter, with over 186,000 posts purportedly about the outage reaching the Elon Musk-owned platform's trending section. "Hacked" also appeared as a trending hashtag as users expressed confusion and concern over whether their accounts might have been hacked (it's unlikely).
While Threads and parts of Instagram and Facebook were hit by the outage, Meta's encrypted messaging service WhatsApp appeared to be working normally. Data from Downdetector, which collects individual user reports, suggests that Facebook Messenger was impacted by the outage, however. Facebook itself received over half a million outage reports, while Instagram has seen nearly 80,000.
Downdetector reports that the majority of Facebook and its Messenger problems appeared for users at the login screen, while Instagram and Threads users reported issues with the app itself. The four Meta-owned apps saw thousands of outage reports beginning at the same time at approximately 10 a.m. ET.
Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp previously experienced a substantial outage back in 2021, which Meta said occurred due to a "faulty configuration change" on its routers.
Editors' Note: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.