Most online services offered by global tech giant Meta across its Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, which have been impacted by major outages, have been brought back online.
In a statement posted on social media platform X earlier on Thursday, Meta said it was aware that a “technical issue” was impacting “some users’ ability” to access their apps worldwide.
It said it was working to get things “back to normal” as quickly as possible.
Meta’s “Status and outages of Meta business products” website confirmed disruptions impacting its Facebook Login, Messenger and Business tools used for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“We are currently experiencing major disruption impacting message delivery on Messenger Platform,” one of the outage alerts said.
“This issue started at 9:58 AM PST (3:58am AEST). Our engineering teams are investigating the issue. We will provide another update within 1 hour or sooner if additional information is available.”
By 10:09am AEST, Meta reported that the issues impacting the Messenger platform had been resolved and users were able to freely access the app.
Meta’s login technology, Business Suite and Shop services for both Facebook and Instagram were all restored between 9am and 10am AEST.
The tech conglomerate said on its status monitor website that by 7:12am AEST it was “seeing recovery from our earlier disruptions in our Ads systems” impacting the Facebook Ads Manager tool on the social media platform.
Disruptions impacting tools used by businesses to create advertisements on Facebook were resolved by 8:21am AEST.
Facebook Business Suite tools for sharing and managing content and receiving inbox messages came back online by 8:36am AEST, but Meta said “some disruptions” were still being experienced by users of the WhatsApp Business platform.
DownDetector, a website that monitors outages of major technology and retail outlets, had reported earlier that thousands of complaints were made by users of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp from 3am AEST onwards.
By 10am AEST, the DownDetector website showed that the earlier outage issues impacting Instagram and WhatsApp had largely been resolved for most users.
Statements were also issued by Instagram and WhatsApp on X, acknowledging the outage and promising users a swift return.
“We expect things to be back to normal shortly,” the statement from WhatsApp read.
Instagram also apologised for any inconvenience.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) latest analysis of social media and internet usage shows that as of June 2023, three in four Australian adults — or 16 million people — use Meta’s Facebook for personal purposes.
The same analysis revealed that 15.3 million people used Messenger, there were 10.8 million WhatsApp users and 10.2 million Instagram users across the nation.
ACMA data showed that overall use of Meta apps had also increased between 2022 and 2023, with the biggest spike in usage seen in a 71 per cent jump in users on Facebook.