An outage hit Meta’s consumer apps on Friday before 10 AM ET.
Reports surged that Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were inaccessible. The problem appeared simultaneously across the services and persisted for several hours, prompting users to post about the issue on other networks. Meta has not yet released an official statement.
The incident matters because the four apps together serve billions of daily users and generate the bulk of Meta’s ad revenue. A single failure exposes how tightly the company’s business model relies on continuous uptime.
Outages of this scale are rare for Meta, but they underscore the fragility of a platform that powers so much of online social life.