While you were sleeping, there was a massive outage on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram around the world. There was power failure around 11 pm on Wednesday night. As of right now, the last update on the outage from Meta was that the problem has been 99 percent fixed, and the company’s engineers are just doing some final checks. There has been no other update yet on this issue or its cause. Meta says it was a “technical issue”.

“We are aware that a technical issue is impacting the ability of some users to access our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta wrote in a post on X. “Thank you for being with us! We’re 99% of the way – just doing some final checks. We apologize to those who have been affected by the outage,” Meta further said.

Due to the outage, users were unable to access Meta services for hours. The “technical issue” affected users’ ability to access Facebook and Instagram websites and apps. There was also a problem in sending WhatsApp messages. The Facebook website was completely inaccessible to some users due to an error prompt appearing on the sign in page.

Although this particular outage was huge and impacted a lot of Meta users, this year, Meta’s biggest “technical glitch” occurred in March, in which the issue caused users to automatically log out of Facebook and Instagram. and blocked them from logging in again, saying their passwords were incorrect. It also had a worldwide impact.

It is not that only Meta is facing outage. Earlier this morning, OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT experienced a global outage, leaving users around the world without access to the chatbot. The outage affected not only ChatGPT, but also OpenAI’s API and the Sora video generator platform. “We are experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to fix it. Sorry and we’ll keep you updated,” OpenAI tweeted at 5.45am (IST) on Thursday.

Technical problems and outages on platforms like Meta and OpenAI are not uncommon and should not be viewed as catastrophic. These phenomena are an inevitable part of the operation of large-scale complex systems. What really matters is the company’s ability to quickly identify and resolve the issue, minimizing disruption and ensuring the reliability of the platform in the long run.