Meta suffered a widespread outage across its social media and messaging apps on Wednesday, with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads all affected. By the late afternoon, the apps were almost fully functional again.

"Thanks for bearing with us! We're 99% of the way there -- just doing some last checks," Meta posted on X at 2:26 p.m. PT/5:56 p.m. ET. "We apologize to those who've been affected by the outage."

Instagram outage reports began spiking at around 10 a.m. PT, according to Downdetector, and the same time frame hit on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Instagram was showing error messages on the web version, and the mobile app had a spinning wheel when users tried to refresh their feeds. Though Stories appeared to be working, the "following" tab was also showing a "couldn't load activity" message. Within a few hours, reports began dropping although pages were still slow to load, and only loading hours-old posts.

"We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps," Meta posted on X at 10:48 a.m. PT. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

Cisco ThousandEyes is attributing the outage to "internal server errors and timeouts, which may indicate issues with Meta's backend services."

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on what caused the outage.

People took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to post about the Instagram outage, asking if others were experiencing the same loading errors and to share memes about the experience.