Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp experiencing problems in UAE

Social media users in Asia report login and messaging issues across Meta's services

Facebook and Instagram users in the UAE have been experiencing issues since Saturday morning. AP Photo

Social media users in the UAE and the region are sharing their frustration as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp suffer technical issues.

The website Downforeveryoneorjustme.com says all three services have been experiencing varying levels of outages since Friday.

The issues, which are still affecting users at 1pm on Saturday, arise when trying to log onto Instagram or Facebook via desktop. Users receive an error message saying the website cannot be loaded, while services on mobile apps are slower to load overall.

WhatsApp messages appear to have normalised, though there is some delay with sending and receiving. Messages are sent quicker on Wi-Fi but remain slow if sent using data.

On Saturday, the website Downdetector.com registered a spike in users reporting WhatsApp issues at 10.47am. The spike was also seen for Facebook from 11.11am, Instagram from 11.12am and Facebook Messenger from 11.14am.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is unaffected and people have taken to the platform to complain.

One user wrote at 11.25am: “Looks like WhatsApp is currently down in the UAE. Please let me know if it is working for someone,” and received various responses from around the region suggesting it was a wider problem.

Other users from Singapore, Indonesia and Bangladesh also claimed they were having issues as well.

Meanwhile, while Meta, the parent company of the three affected platforms, was slow to fix the issues, it allowed one user to joke that they would use it as an “opportunity to touch some grass”.

Meta has not yet issued any statement about the problems.