In Washington, Biden administration officials said they were monitoring the outages experienced by Meta Platforms, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The social media giant, shares of which were down 1.5 per cent in late morning trade, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, including WhatsApp and Threads.
Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
Although the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, with under 200 incident reports each on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working”.
X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s US$44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France.