WhatsApp says it’s back online after global outage

WhatsApp was back online as of Wednesday evening after thousands of global users reported issues earlier in the day.

“And we’re back. Happy chatting,” the company wrote on its X account at about 6:20 p.m. ET, nearly four hours after its original post confirming issues had arisen.

According to DownDetector, there were nearly 9,000 reports of outages by Canadians at about 2:30 p.m. ET, with the U.S. seeing slightly more than 18,000 issues related to WhatsApp. There were even more in other countries, with the U.K. seeing about 68,000 outage reports and India at about 31,000 about the same time. Those numbers began to decline in several countries at about 3 p.m. ET.

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There were also reports of issues with several other applications owned by Meta, including nearly 1,500 reports for Instagram in Canada and 500 for Facebook, according to DownDetector. Those have declined since, with just slightly more than 100 reports for Instagram and eight for Facebook as of 7 p.m. ET.

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It’s not the first time Meta has seen issues with its applications, with the most recent happening just last month when thousands of Facebook and Instagram users both in Canada and around the world reported being signed out of their accounts. They were unable to access either platform for more than two hours.

Meta at the time said a technical issue caused the problems. It was later resolved.

Global News reached out to Meta to request comment on Wednesday’s reported issues but did not hear back before publication.