Facebook & Instagram Messenger Are Down & Now You Can Blame Meta For It

This is it: the moment Mark Zuckerberg has been preparing for.

Many users complained about problems with Facebook and Instagram Messenger on Wednesday and it's officially time to blame someone else for the problem.

That someone else is Meta, the new name for Facebook Inc. that Zuckerberg introduced at a Facebook Connect event last week.

Zuckerberg said he chose the name to reflect the company's new focus on virtual reality (i.e. the metaverse). Of course, there were plenty of people who saw it as nothing more than an attempt to rebrand Facebook after years of being called manipulative and bad for democracy.

Either way, it didn't take long for Meta to become the new bad guy with Wednesday's outage, which seemed to affect some users on Instagram and Facebook.

Users (including us) couldn't access Messenger on Facebook or Instagram on Wednesday afternoon.

The website Down Detector logged thousands of issues with Facebook Messenger beginning around 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday. The outage seemed to be affecting users in Canada, the US and in many other countries.

Facebook Meta did not immediately address the outage.