The tech giant said the outage stems from ‘a technical issue’.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has said that a recent outage affecting its services yesterday is “99pc resolved”.

The website DownDetector shows that users started reporting issues with the tech giant’s apps yesterday evening.

In addition, another tech business, OpenAI, has recently reported an outage, which has since been fixed, according to the company.

Whenever users attempted to access Facebook, they were met with an error screen, which read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

This prompted several users to take to other social media apps in an effort to notify Meta of the outage.

Following suit, Meta took to X yesterday evening in order to make a statement regarding the outage: “We’re aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience.”

And in a follow-up post posted at 10.26pm last night, Meta said: “Thanks for bearing with us! We’re 99pc of the way there – just doing some last checks.

“We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage.”

‘A reminder of the vulnerabilities’

Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of Matrix, said that the outage is “a reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in centralised messaging services”.

“When such a major player experiences downtime, millions are left unable to connect, highlighting the risks of relying on a single entity for our communication needs,” Hodgson said. “This is precisely why decentralised, end-to-end encryption messaging apps are the way forward.”

He added: “In an age where privacy is paramount and Big Tech is untrustworthy, embracing decentralised solutions not only enhances our security but also empowers us to take back control over our digital interactions.”

Outages are unfortunately a recurring problem in the digital age. On 25 November, Microsoft announced it was investigating an issue which affected users worldwide across Outlook, Teams and Exchange Online.

In the context of Meta, the company experienced two outages in the space of one month. The first outage occurred in March and the second in April.

In addition, a massive outage involving Microsoft and Crowdstrike caused worldwide disruption in July.

The global IT issue caused chaos at the times, with airlines around the world reporting delayed and cancelled flights, and there were reports of various PCs showing the famous ‘blue screen of death’ – an infamous Windows error message.

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