Massive Outage Hits Apple and Meta Apps, Thousands of Users Affected

• Meta Apps - Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook were down across many countries on Wednesday night
• Apple faced similar outage issues affecting the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple Podcast
• Both services have been restored now

Both Apple and Meta's apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) were hit by a massive outage yesterday.

Several users were reportedly unable to use WhatsApp and Instagram. When trying to log into the apps or WhatsApp Web, users were shown an error message stating that the service was currently unavailable. Instagram users had trouble refreshing their feeds and seeing new stories.

Shortly after, #Whatsappdown started trending on X followed by a series of memes making fun of the outage.

• The problem began sometime around 18:00 BST and around 18:20 BST, 3700 outages were reported by Instagram users.
• A small number of outages - approximately 1840 - also affected Facebook users at 18:23 BST.
• Then, by 18:25 BST, Downdetector (a site that monitors the performance of other websites) reported that more than 82,000 users were facing trouble using WhatsApp.

The outage was not just limited to the UK alone. For example, a Reuters report revealed that more than 5,000 US users had trouble with Instagram and 24,000 users faced difficulty with WhatsApp.

3,500 users from India and 7,000 from Brazil have also been affected by this outage.

It looks like most of the problem has been resolved. Meta's status site, for instance, indicates that these communication platforms are back on. However, some of its business and other messaging platforms might still face disruptions.

Meta's service has been a little rocky this year. Just last month on March 5, the company was hit by a major technical outage that affected users worldwide. Once again, all three apps - Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram - were affected.

Users were unable to send/receive messages, refresh their feeds, or watch reels. The only silver lining here is that the outage lasted less than an hour in most regions.

While Meta has yet to make a comment on this, WhatsApp shared a post on X saying We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible."

Apple's App Store & Other Services Hit by an OutageIn a separate technical problem, many Apple products such as the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Podcast, and Apple Music were also down.

The company's status page noted the outage on Wednesday night around 6:31 PM ET and at around 7:35 PM ET, the outage was marked resolved.

Although the reason behind the outage has not been revealed, users have been advised to keep checking the system page for more updates.

Some users reported that, unlike Meta's outage, there were no error messages in this case. People were simply unable to install/update apps, stream music, or watch TV shows.

On the other hand, a few other users have shared screenshots showing the error message they were displayed when they tried to open the App Store. However, the screenshot is in Spanish, which might mean that different regions have been affected differently.

It's not common for Apple to have such outages. The last time Apple's services went down was in 2022. The App Store, iMessage, Apple Arcade, and Maps took the hit.

Interestingly, even then, different users were affected differently. For some people, the App Store wouldn't even load. But for others, it would load but not let you download anything.

That outage also affected its internal employees and retail associates. However, Apple being Apple, the services were restored quickly.

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