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Are WhatsApp and Facebook down? Here’s what you need to know

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WhatsApp logo on a phone held in hand.
Tushar Mehta / Digital Trends

If you use WhatsApp, Facebook, or other Meta-owned apps, chances are you had a rough afternoon today. Why? WhatsApp, Facebook, and other apps were down for a couple of hours.

When did the outage start? What apps were affected? Are things finally back to normal? Here’s what you need to know.

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When did the WhatsApp outage start?

According to DownDetector, reports of WhatsApp being down started flooding in around 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, April 3. Reports spiked at around 2:19, with multiple thousands of people reporting issues with the app.

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Reports indicate that WhatsApp users were unable to send or receive messages. You could still open and use other app functions, but sending/receiving messages was broken.

If you recall, this comes just about a month after Facebook and Instagram experienced a widespread outage in early March.

Is WhatsApp still down?

As of around 4 p.m. ET, it appears that WhatsApp is (mostly) back to normal. DownDector outage reports have shrunk significantly compared to earlier this afternoon. Users across X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit are also commenting that things are back to normal.

We know some people are experiencing issues right now, we're working on getting things back to 100% for everyone as quickly as possible

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) April 3, 2024

The WhatsApp X account hasn’t confirmed this yet. Its last post was from 2:55 p.m., announcing it was “working on getting things back to 100% for everyone.” If you’re still having trouble with WhatsApp on your end, things should be back to normal soon.

Were other Meta apps and websites down?

In addition to WhatsApp, DownDetector also showed increased outage reports for Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram — all Meta-owned services. Outage reports for these sites have also decreased compared to earlier this afternoon, indicating that Meta is bringing everything back online.

Looking at the Meta “status and outages” website, Meta still reports “major disruptions” for the following services:

  • Messenger API for Instagram
  • Messenger Platform
  • WhatsApp Business API
  • Ads Transparency

It’s clear that something funky is still happening with some of Meta’s backend, though your WhatsApp message sending should be functioning once again.

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Joe Maring
Joe Maring
Section Editor, Mobile
Joe Maring is the Section Editor for Digital Trends' Mobile team, leading the site's coverage for all things smartphones…
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