Just before 5:30 p.m., the number of reported outages on Facebook had dropped to just over 1,200, Instagram reports fell to about 1,900 from a peak of more than 68,000 and reports of issues on WhatsApp and Messenger were far below their peaks.

Meta-owned Instagram said its services were back online after thousands of users experienced technical issues accessing its platform on Wednesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Meta owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp. Downdetector showed 8,234 reports of outages from Whatsapp users. Among those, 82 percent reported problems with sending messages.