Meta-owned WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook late Wednesday night came crashing down after thousands of users reported its global outage. WhatsApp Down and Instagram Down were reported around 11 pm (IST) after thousands of users around the world were not able to send any messages or even update their status. While Meta-owned social media apps were down, users were hit another shocker when AI chatbot ChatGPT went down.
After ChatGPT Down was reported, millions of users were unable to access the service for nearly three hours. ChagtGPT Down was witnessed at 5:30 AM IST on Thursday. When users logged into ChatGPT, they encountered an error message stating the service was unavailable. This disruption extended beyond ChatGPT, affecting OpenAI's API, a critical tool for developers, and Sora, another AI-powered service.
After X was filled with memes on ChatGPT Down and Meta Down, the AI Chatbot creator OpenAI acknowledged the issue and also posted about the same on X that reads, "We're experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry and we'll keep you updated!"
According to Downdetector, over 33 thousand users reported Instagram down at 11:30 pm (IST). The graph of complaints declined around 2 am in the night. The same goes for WhatsApp. Over 31,000 people reported WhatsApp down. Around 2 am, the graph of outages started to go down.
Why did Meta-owned social media apps go down?
As per reports, Meta said it was working on a solution soon after outage reports began surfacing. It is pertinent to mention here that a similar major outage occurred in 2021, affecting Meta's services for nearly six hours. OpenAI claimed to have successfully restored services of ChatGPT. Zuckerberg's Meta too confirmed that the services of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have been restored.
Meta acknowledged the issue on X and wrote, "Thanks for bearing with us! We're 99% of the way there - just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who've been affected by the outage."
WhatsApp and Instagram also confirmed their restoration on X, with WhatsApp stating, "And we're back, happy chatting!" and Instagram adding: "Andddd we're back - sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us."
Notably, Meta did not specify the reason behind the global outage of its social media apps.
However, ET reported that TechCrunch OpenAI's integration with Apple in iOS 18.2 could have caused an influx of traffic on the company’s servers. The Conversation suggested that since the outage affected all products of Meta, there could be "a single point of failure: something relied upon by all of Meta’s services, without which the services can’t function".