 "A 3D printed logo of Meta is placed on laptop keyboard in this illustration taken on November 2, 2021. Reuters")
On Wednesday evening, thousands of users worldwide experienced outages on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all owned by Meta.
OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT, also experienced a significant outage on Thursday morning.
Although the issues were resolved after several hours, the outages affected millions of users who were unable to access services on the platforms.
Here’s all we know about the outages.
Meta outage
According to media reports, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram went down at around 10.58 pm IST, disrupting social media activities of numerous users globally.
For many users, access to posts, messages, and updates was either delayed or unavailable.
Many WhatsApp users complained that sending and receiving messages was difficult.
On X (formerly Twitter) , some Facebook and Instagram users reported that they were seeing an error message stating that “something went wrong” and that Meta was trying to resolve the issue.
Some users saw blank home screens on Instagram for more than three minutes, as per USA Today.
For all three meta-owned platforms, Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages, has received over 130,000 complaints. The number of outage complaints peaked at about 11.40 pm IST and then began to drop.
Users reported issues throughout the UK and areas of Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America, according to the data.
Instagram and Meta acknowledged the reported problems affecting certain users’ access to their apps in posts on X.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta’s statement said around midnight on Thursday.
Following the disruptions to the platforms, a large number of social media users shared their experiences on X.
Taking to X, one social media user wrote, “Instagram, Facebook & Whatsapp down? Off to X like the rest of us. We’re all the same."
Another one wrote, “Twitter right now as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook goes down." “Everybody running to Twitter to see if Instagram, Whatsapp down for everyone else," third user commented.
ChatGPT outage
Significant disruptions were also encountered by ChatGPT early on Thursday morning.
For almost three hours, millions of users were unable to access the service due to the disruption.
On Thursday, users attempting to connect into ChatGPT were met with an error notice indicating that the service was disconnected just before 5:30 am IST.
OpenAI soon addressed the problem on social media.
It wrote, “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!”
Issues resolved
Around 3:50 am, Meta shared an update: “Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99 per cent of the way there - just doing some last checks. We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage.”
“And we’re back, happy chatting!” WhatsApp said on X.
“Andddd we’re back - sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us,” Instagram said.
Additionally, OpenAI asserted that ChatGPT’s services had been successfully restored.
Reason behind the outages
OpenAI and Meta have not disclosed the cause of the outage to the public.
OpenAI, however, claimed to have “identified the issue.”
TechCrunch claims that OpenAI’s iOS 18.2 integration with Apple may have resulted in a spike in traffic on the company’s servers.
According to The Conversation, the outage not only affected Meta’s main social media platforms but also business products. The company’s Login with Facebook service, which enables users to access third-party websites by using their Facebook login credentials, was also impacted.
Thus, as per the report, there might be a “single point of failure: something relied upon by all of Meta’s services, without which the services cannot function.”
Not the first time
Thousands of Facebook and Instagram users worldwide were affected for more than two hours by an outage caused by a technical problem in March earlier this year.
According to Meta, the outage affected hundreds of thousands of users and was brought on by a technical issue, as reported by Reuters.
According to The New York Times, there were over 91,000 reports of Instagram issues and over 538,000 reports of Facebook issues at the height of that outage.
The platforms faced another outage in October, when services were largely restored within an hour, as per Reuters.
In 2021, Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, apologised for the inconvenience caused by the company’s biggest outage.
During that time, the services of Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger were unavailable for about six hours.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an apology on X last month following ChatGPT’s 30-minute outage .
The lack of a chatbot affected more than 19,000 users, according to Downdetector.
Altman acknowledged the downtime in a post on X, saying that while the company’s reliability has improved significantly, much more work has to be done.
Other tech outages
Some Microsoft platforms were unavailable for over a day on November 25.
Microsoft did not say which programmes were affected, but the downtime coincided with the release of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that was designed to capture normal computer activity snapshots.
On November 21, Reddit had two outages in a single day after over 76,000 users reported problems with the app and website to DownDetector.
In July, several Windows 365 users across the world complained that they were experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error , which is causing the system to suddenly shut down or restart.
Some reports suggested that a cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike , which produces antivirus software, issued a software update that went horribly wrong, leading to the so-called “blue screen of death” on PCs.
The US-based company later said that the preliminary root cause was a “configuration change” in a portion of its Azure backend workloads. For those who are unaware, Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform.
With inputs from agencies