OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT and Meta's social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and instant messaging application WhatsApp have been restored after a large-scale global outage disrupting communication and social media activities on Wednesday.

The outage was experienced in many countries including the UK, parts of Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the US.

Neither Meta nor OpenAI publicly revealed what caused the operational failure. However, reports suggested that OpenAI's integration with Apple in iOS 18.2 could night have caused an influx of traffic on the company’s servers.

Taking cognisance of the widespread disruptions, Meta said it was working to resolve the technical issue and said it was doing some last-minute checks as most users reported that they could use the social media applications again.

Issuing a statement on X, Meta said it was aware of the global outage and said it was working to restore WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

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

Reports of issues began around 10:58 pm. The outage tracking website DownDetector on Wednesday suggested that over 50,000 Facebook users had reported inconvenience. The range of issues included problems with logging in, uploading posts, and updating existing content around 11 pm (IST).

At 3:56 am (IST), Meta gave an update,"Thanks for bearing with us! We're 99% of the way there - just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who've been affected by the outage."

Besides facebook, Instagram as well faced similar issues where over 23,000 users highlighted issues in accessing posts or updating content. The app also frequently crashed, adding to the difficulties for many.

Problems were encountered by WhatsApp users as well problems, with several reporting issues in sending and receiving messages.

Disruption in OpenAI's Artificial Intelligence tools ChatGPT and Sora also left millions of users in trouble as they failed to access the service for nearly three hours.

Acknowledging the issue, ChatGPT creator OpenAI posted about the same on X.

“We're experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry and we'll keep you updated!,” posted the company.

However, the services resumed after a global outage of five hours. Taking to X, OpenAI wrote, “ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we've recovered.”