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By Monica Sager
Live News Reporter
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There has been a spike in Facebook and Instagram outages across the country since 1 p.m.
At 1:20 p.m. ET, Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, showed over 105,00 reports of Facebook not working, with majority of those saying the issue comes from the app. The website also received 11,000 reports of problems with Facebook Messenger and 70,590 reports that Instagram was down, with 78 percent noting the issue stemmed from the app.
Downdetector shows the brunt of the problem taking place in Chicago, with issues spanning the rest of the country as well.
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Newsweek reached out to a representative at Meta, the parent company for both social media platforms, for comment.
"We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps," Meta posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, almost an hour after the outages started. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."
Problems users are experiencing range from not being able to use the service's apps or websites to not being able to post or see comments. People have reported the apps showing them error messages, including Facebook saying "we're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."
Meta owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp. Downdetector showed 8,234 reports of outages from Whatsapp users. Among those, 82 percent reported problems with sending messages.
Threads has also seen a spike in its social media platform's outages, but the numbers are not as extreme as other Meta apps. Downdetector showed 892 outages for Threads, with 70 percent of the issue coming from the app itself.
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Originally known as Facebook, the company was rebranded in 2021 to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse." The company is ranked among the largest American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
Meta faced similar outage issues nine months ago, when users were unable to log into Facebook, Instagram and Threads sites for several hours.
"Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services," Meta Communications Director Andy Stone said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, at the time. "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
For Facebook users at the time, they were often logged out of their accounts. Instagram users could not refresh their feeds, and people saw on Threads a message saying "Sorry, something went wrong. Try again." The outage in March also spanned to some users' Meta Quest headsets.
Meta also saw a major outage that affected Instagram and Facebook in October of 2022.
Updated, 12/11/2024, 1:40 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
Updated, 12/11/2024, 3:40 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with a statement from Meta about the outage.
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