Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram stumble on and offline in global outage
Meta’s techies are likely having a bad day as the internet titan’s Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are suffering some degree of downtime globally.
Services started dropping off around 0900 PT (1700 UTC). As you might expect from a huge distributed system, some people can or could get through to Meta’s apps and sites as normal, and some are ran or are still running into errors and unable to use stuff as expected.
WhatsApp appeared to be getting back online at one point but again fell down. Meta’s status page reports major disruption to all of the platform’s services, with the odd exception of ad transparency tools.
It’s not a total outage. Informal testing by your humble vultures around the world indicated that there are problems in Europe, US, and Asia-Pacific, but even then people sitting next to each other in an office are getting different results.
“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,” Mark Zuckerberg’s minions said in a statement on X, which is holding up just fine.
It’s second time unlucky for Meta, since its empire’s services also had an outage earlier this year. In March its servers failed on the Super Tuesday election day — which prompted conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork. Thankfully the outage only lasted a few hours. [Thankfully? – ed.]
We’ll have more on this as it develops.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate diplomacy
Talks are well underway in preparation for the next major international meeting on climate change, 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28), scheduled to begin Nov. 30 in the United Arab Emirates.
Much like last year’s COP27, finances — specifically, aid to developing nations — will be at the center of conference deliberations.
The conference faces an even greater sense of urgency brought on by the Sept. 8, 2023, release of the first global stocktake, which calls for accelerated action to meet the goals set in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (COP21).
Climate diplomacy: COP 27 | Climate diplomacy: COP 28 | Climate diplomacy: COP 29