Facebook Instagram Threads and Whatsapp Reportedly Restored After Global Outage

Meta Platforms' social media apps Instagram and Facebook, messaging app WhatsApp and Twitter-rival Threads were all back up after a brief outage affecting thousands of users on Monday, according to Downdetector.com.

At the peak of the outage, lasting over an hour, over 14,000 users reported issues with accessing Instagram, while around 7,000 and 2,700 users faced issues with Facebook and WhatsApp, respectively.

Meta's newest offering Threads also experienced an outage, with about 470 users reporting problems accessing the app.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage could have affected a larger number of users.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters query on the outages.

Meanwhile, Meta also plans to label government-affiliated accounts on its new Twitter-like platform Threads, an executive told an Australian inquiry on foreign interference on Tuesday.

"Areas such as labels for state-affiliated media and fact-checking are all areas where we see a lot of value, and it's our aspiration to build that out expeditiously," Josh Machin, Meta's head of public policy for Australia, told the Senate inquiry.

The disclosure comes less than a week after Meta launched Threads, which is widely seen as similar to the microblogging site Twitter.

Twitter has removed tags from government-affiliated accounts since billionaire Elon Musk took it private in 2022, bringing complaints about degrading users' media literacy.

Asked if Russian state-affiliated broadcaster RT or Chinese government-affiliated publisher Xinhua News Agency would be tagged accordingly on Threads, Machin said, "that's our aspiration".

"To the effect that any state-affiliated media are violating our policies, we would remove them," he told the inquiry. "Broader functionality around tags... are all top priorities for us as we continue to bring out the product."

Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms already have tags on the RT and Xinhua accounts noting they are state-controlled media from Russia and China, respectively.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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