Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more down as world’s biggest websites hit by outage

Etsy, the US Postal Service and many more sites not working properly

Facebook, Instagram, Etsy and US postal taken down amid major outages

The world’s biggest websites were hit by a series of outages yesterday in a significant global internet problem.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more were all suffering from problems that stopped people getting online through websites and apps.

It is not clear if the outages were connected. But they all mysteriously began at the same time, and were being felt across the world.

Recap the events as they happened with our live blog below

[13 March 2019 19:37 · Andrew Griffin]

Though the problems are not hitting everyone, they are being felt just about everywhere. Here's the Instagram map:

(Those places like Asia that don't have as many reports are probably just asleep.)

[13 March 2019 19:43 · Andrew Griffin]

All of the other, non-Facebook websites that were having problems earlier – Etsy, the US Postal Service – appear to have mostly fixed themselves.

They might have just been a very neat coincidence, and suffered a relatively normal and quick outage at the same time as Facebook.

We know, though, that the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outages are more severe, and appear to be connected to each other. And they're still very much ongoing.

[13 March 2019 19:52 · Andrew Griffin]

Just to confirm: same problems, still very much happening, at Facebook and Instagram (and WhatsApp though apparently to a leaser degree).

[13 March 2019 20:11 · Andrew Griffin]

All of the Facebook apps are still bad, and perhaps getting worse. Here's another map, just so you can see how widespread these things are.

[13 March 2019 20:34 · Andrew Griffin]

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A strange and unpredictable part of tonight's outage is that it has been scored by rappers saying strange things about social media.

First, Soulja Boy weighed in on the outage, suggesting it would be better if he just created his own app:

And then he actually appeared to create that app, and launch it, all while the Facebook problems were still ongoing:

[13 March 2019 20:46 · Andrew Griffin]

And there's also this, from Ice-T:

[13 March 2019 20:48 · Andrew Griffin]

The official Facebook account first tweeted that it was aware of the problems three hours ago. (And even at that time, the issues had been ongoing for a while.)

The last post it did was two hours ago. Then it said was that it was not suffering a DDoS attack, and that it was working to fix the issues.

The problems are still ongoing and the account hasn't posted since.

[13 March 2019 20:52 · Andrew Griffin]

Verizon, Spectrum and AT&T all seeing increased reports of problems, though that might be because people assume the issue is with their carrier, not the websites they're trying to use them to get to.

[13 March 2019 21:08 · Andrew Griffin]

A quick rundown of where we are now, if you're just tuning in:

• Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and (apparently to a lesser extent) WhatsApp are all down.
• The problems have been ongoing for hours, and  Facebook says it is working hard to fix them.
• Other sites were hit by outages at the same time, but that appears to be coincidental. Those affected – Etsy, the US Postal Service – are back online.
• Facebook has denied that it is undergoing a DDoS attack – but has not said what is happening, and we've not heard from them for hours.

[13 March 2019 21:16 · Andrew Griffin]

A representative from Network company Netscout has been in touch, claiming to know the cause of today's problems. Get settled in, because this explanation from Roland Dobbins, the company's principle engineer, is a little long and very complicated. I'll do my best at translating it afterwards.

“At approximately 12:52PM EST on March 13th, 2019, it appears that an accidental BGP routing leak from a European ISP to a major transit ISP, which was then propagated onwards to some peers and/or downstreams of the transit ISP in question, resulted in perceptible disruption of access to some well-known Internet properties for a short interval.  While not malicious in nature, such events can prove disruptive on a widespread basis."

When he says BGP he means "Border Gateway Protocol". That's one of the many bits of technology that acts as the infrastructure for the internet: it's a kind of routing system, or a series of signs that point internet traffic around to where they need to go. And so what Netscout is saying is that those signs got mixed up by an ISP (or internet service provider), which ended up sending traffic to the wrong place. That started propagating out across the internet – like if a road sign was pointing the wrong way, and then cars started following other cars down that mistaken path – making it into a major problem. And from there, he says, our issues arrived.

Dobbins says this one isn't malicious. But that same process has been hijacked many times before in malicious ways, and can be used to create the kind of disruption we've seen here.

I hope that all makes sense!