Meta's suite of apps went dark for thousands of users across the United States on Thursday morning, with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger all experiencing significant disruptions. The outage began around 9am ET and quickly escalated, with reports flooding into monitoring services.

Andy Stone, Meta's Vice President of Communications, confirmed the company was aware of access issues affecting multiple platforms. According to Meta's official status page, engineers were actively working on resolving the problems, with an update promised within an hour or sooner.

By 11am ET, outage tracking site Downdetector recorded over 20,000 reports at its peak, making this one of the more significant recent incidents. Users reported being automatically logged out of Facebook, while Instagram remained partially functional but displayed outdated content feeds.

The timing couldn't be worse for Meta, which has been pushing users toward its newer Threads platform while maintaining its core apps. When billions rely on these services daily for communication and business, even brief outages create immediate ripple effects across personal and professional workflows.