On Wednesday, Meta’s services, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, experienced a significant outage that affected thousands of users across the UAE. The disruption lasted for over four hours, causing widespread frustration among users who rely on these platforms for social media interaction and messaging.

The Outage

The issue started around 9:50 PM UAE time (12:50 PM ET), and within minutes, users began reporting problems on Downdetector, an outage tracking website. At the peak of the disruption, over 2,600 incidents were reported for WhatsApp and more than 2,000 for Instagram. These outages affected many users, particularly in the UAE, who were unable to send or receive messages on WhatsApp or load posts on Facebook and Instagram.

Users took to Twitter (X) to share their frustration, with memes and complaints flooding the platform. Many shared screenshots of error messages such as "something went wrong," indicating that Meta was aware of the issue but had not yet resolved it.

Meta’s Response

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, acknowledged the problem on X (formerly Twitter), stating that they were aware of the issue and working to restore services. At around 2:26 AM, Meta tweeted: “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.”

In a separate update, both Facebook and Instagram posted on X: "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

By 2:30 AM, the situation started to improve, and services began to come back online. While many users were still facing issues, Meta reassured them that the outage would soon be fully resolved.

The Global Impact

The outage wasn’t limited to the UAE. Around the world, thousands of users reported issues with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. According to Downdetector, globally, there were more than 27,000 reports of Facebook issues and over 28,000 incidents related to Instagram. WhatsApp, Meta’s popular messaging platform, also saw more than 12,000 user-reported issues.

The exact number of affected users may vary, as Downdetector relies on user-submitted reports, but the outage was widespread, causing inconvenience to users in various countries.

Previous Outages

This is not the first time Meta’s platforms have experienced significant outages. Earlier in 2024, Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of users globally. In October, a similar issue arose, but services were largely restored within an hour.

Despite these recurring outages, Meta has consistently worked to resolve the issues and restore normal service as quickly as possible.