On Wednesday, people throughout the world were unable to access Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, all owned by Meta. The companies' cloud and corporate APIs as well as its lucrative user-tracking ad tech were reportedly affected.

During the downtime, a business status update was provided at 19:19 GMT (15:19 ET). "We are aware that some advertisers may be experiencing issues either accessing or viewing reporting for their ads," the report stated.

The message from Meta said, "Our engineering teams are aware of the issue and are actively working to resolve it." The website DownDetector, which keeps track of these disruptions, states that complaints of issues on the platforms started to appear at about 18:00 GMT (14:00 ET).

Facebook and WhatsApp looked to have mostly restored service as of 21:00 GMT (17:00 ET), however Instagram did not. Some users were upset about this on Reddit, asking, "When is Instagram working fine anyways?" I'm so over the bugs. 

WhatsApp got the most complaints, clearing over 21,269 reports during the height of the incident, while Instagram logged thousands within the first half hour of the outage, peaking at 5,771. Based on the first DownDetector notification, there were just 714 complaints concerning Facebook service, reaching a peak of about 1,600 complaints prior to the platform's brief outage being fixed.

Based on the tracking of complaints by DownDetector, users of Facebook's desktop client looked to be among the most impacted in the Dallas and Houston, Texas locations. According to the website, a sizable portion of Instagram outage claims originated in Los Angeles.

The bulk of complaints about Instagram (58%) and WhatsApp (69%) concerned the sites' mobile app versions.