Meta-owned apps Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Threads, the new rival to billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter, experienced a widespread service interruption in the US, India and some parts of Europe on Friday, according to social media users.
“Facebook services have been experiencing international outages for many users, with high impact to Messenger and media upload endpoints; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, wrote on Twitter.
Some of the problems faced by users included delays in app uploading, sending messages, posting images and videos, service checker Downdetector reported.
More than 450 users reported problems related to Meta applications on Downdetector on Friday.
“Instagram and Threads reportedly both down for users,” one user said on Twitter.
“Instagram experiencing widespread outage in US, [the] UK, Italy and France, with some users reporting app crashing and closing every few minutes,” another user wrote on social media.
Both apps were down briefly at 6.20am New York time but were back online within few minutes when The National tried to gain access to them from Toronto.
Meta did not respond immediately to The National’s request for comment.
Meta stock, which closed 0.81 per cent down at $291.99 a share on Thursday, was trading 0.72 per cent lower at $289.90 in pre-market trading on Friday.
Threads, Instagram’s text-based conversation app, marks the highest-profile attempt so far to challenge the primacy of rival social media platform Twitter.
It is where “communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow”, according to its listings on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
The app grew to more than 30 million users in less than 24 hours of its launch. By comparison, Twitter’s current user count stands at 300 million.
Users aged 12 and older will be able to log into Threads through their Instagram accounts.
The app allows people to post threads, reply to others and follow profiles that they are interested in.
Threads and replies can include short pieces of text, links, photos, videos or a combination of them.
People can follow users to see their threads and replies in their feeds. Access to posts on Threads will be determined by a profile’s privacy setting.
However, the newest app’s data policy was mocked by Twitter boss Elon Musk and its founder Jack Dorsey.
