Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp Down Worldwide! Meta Hit by Global Outage, Hacker Group Claims DDoS Attack | Langit Eastern
Meta's services suffered a major global outage on Friday morning (12/6) Eastern Time, leaving millions of users worldwide unable to access Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger for several hours. Andy Stone, Meta's VP of Communications, confirmed the disruption and stated that engineering teams were actively working to restore services.
Timeline: Started on WhatsApp, Spread Across All Platforms
According to The Next Web's reporting, the trouble began around 9:30 AM ET on WhatsApp before spreading to other platforms. Facebook users reported being abruptly logged out, encountering "Query Error" or "Sorry, something went wrong" messages, and being unable to log back in. Others could open the app but could not post, comment, react, search, or load Stories and Marketplace features.
Data from outage-tracking site DownDetector showed a sharp spike in reports. Facebook bore the brunt with over 130,000 outage reports, Instagram logged around 9,500, and WhatsApp recorded far fewer. Most users flagged problems with the app itself, followed by login issues. Reports poured in from far beyond the United States, spanning the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, Spain, and South Africa, pointing to a central infrastructure problem rather than a localized glitch.
Business Impact: Ads Manager and WhatsApp Business Affected
The disruption extended well beyond casual scrolling. Meta's business status page logged "High Disruptions" across its business products, including Facebook Ads Manager, the Messenger Platform, the Messenger API for Instagram, and the WhatsApp Business Platform. Advertisers were unable to create or edit ads during the outage window, and the Friday timing made the impact particularly painful for businesses relying on Meta's platforms for sales and marketing.
Meta later apologized via its status page: "We have recovered from an earlier outage impacting Ads Creation and Editing, and services have now been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused." However, the WhatsApp Business Platform still showed "High Disruptions" at the time of initial reporting, indicating uneven recovery across the company's product portfolio.
Hacker Group Claims Responsibility: "ANONYMOUS HOTZ /// APT" Demands $100,000 Ransom
TraceX Labs, an Indian cybersecurity and threat intelligence company, identified a dark web portal on the Tor network where a group calling itself "ANONYMOUS HOTZ /// APT" claimed responsibility for the global outage. The hidden service, which appeared shortly after the disruption began, is primarily in Chinese with an English translation option available.
The group claims to have executed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack targeting Meta Platforms' global infrastructure. They assert that Instagram and Facebook were "taken offline globally" with service disruptions lasting more than six hours. The portal contains a ransom demand of $100,000 USD payable in USDT (TRC20) cryptocurrency, with wallet address TKjqghf5aYdnpE4ZXFexZd1HYRrYC1EVXa, accompanied by threats of a larger attack within 30 days if payment is not made. TraceX Labs emphasizes that no verified technical evidence currently confirms these claims, and the outage may have been caused by internal infrastructure failures or configuration errors.
Meta Yet to Announce Official Cause, Recovery Proceeds in Stages
By Friday afternoon ET, Meta had restored most consumer-facing services. The company's status page as of 4:22 PM ET indicated that all disruptions had been restored and concluded. However, Meta has not yet provided an official explanation for the root cause, whether it was a configuration error, an infrastructure failure, or a cyberattack.
The uneven recovery pattern across regions and platforms reinforces the theory that the problem originated from Meta's central systems. Users in some regions reported faster restoration while others continued to experience empty Stories bars, stale feeds, or "Try Again" errors well into the afternoon. The scale of this outage serves as a stark reminder of the world's dependence on Meta's ecosystem: with billions of users, even a few hours offline creates significant ripple effects across messaging, business operations, and third-party logins connected to Meta's platforms.
Saran Link Internal: History of major social media platform outages, What is a DDoS attack and how it works, Tips for securing social media accounts during service disruptions