Meta’s social media apps including Threads restored after brief outage

Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, the social media apps owned by Meta Platforms, experienced a temporary outage on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. 

Downdetector reported that Instagram had the highest number of reported issues, with over 14,000 users facing difficulties accessing the platform. Facebook and WhatsApp also experienced disruptions, with around 7,000 and 2,700 users reporting problems, respectively.  

Even Meta’s latest app, Threads, faced an outage, with approximately 470 users encountering issues accessing the app. Threads meanwhile reported there are now over 100 million accounts on the Threads app. 

The outage lasted for over an hour or so and affected thousands of users mostly in the US region. Notably, this is the second time in less than a month that Meta-owned platforms suffered an outage. On June 17, Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage, when users globally, including in India, were unable to access the platforms. Instagram stories displayed an error message while loading, and users reported difficulties in sending and receiving messages on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. After it was back up for most users, the company had said that after a technical issue that disrupted services to thousands of people had been resolved. 

Meanwhile, a report from Reuters, noted on Tuesday, a Meta executive during an Australian inquiry on foreign interference, revealed that the company is looking to designate government-affiliated accounts on its Twitter-like platform Threads. 

“Areas such as labels for state-affiliated media and fact-checking are all areas where we see a lot of value, and it’s our aspiration to build that out expeditiously,” Josh Machin, Meta’s head of public policy for Australia, said during a Senate inquiry on foreign interference.  

Twitter had removed tags from government-affiliated accounts since Elon Musk took it private in 2022, which resulted in complaints regarding the impact on users’ media literacy. 

Machin said that “broader functionality around tags... are all top priorities for us as we continue to bring out the product." 

Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms already have tags on websites such as Russian Times of Russia and Xinhua of China, noting they are state-controlled media from these countries. 

Meta also confirmed that the problems related to Ads Manager, the advertising platform that enables brands to purchase and develop Facebook advertisements, were also resolved.