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 21:41 · Andrew Griffin]

They're still down.

[13 March 2019 21:44 · Andrew Griffin]

The problems definitely seem to be related to connection issues, rather than bugs in the app or anything else like that. Which means... the sometimes-helpful trick of logging out and/or deleting the app and then logging in and/or installing it won't work.

I don't think there's any tricks to get around it. We'll just have to wait it out. But at least we'll be waiting it out together.

[13 March 2019 21:47 · Andrew Griffin]

Facebook's platform page reflects the problems, but calls them an "issue". Here's what it looks like:

Clicking through shows this description: "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution."

That note was first registered five hours ago. It's not been updated for four hours.

[13 March 2019 21:50 · Andrew Griffin]

Unlike Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp don't have platform status pages.

WhatsApp does have an official Twitter account for that purpose but it's not been touched for five years, since it was bought by Facebook. Instagram has a general Twitter account but hasn't posted.

It's now been four hours since the Facebook account first posted about the problem, and three hours since it last did. (Then, it suggested it was too busy fixing the problem to give any information on it.)

[13 March 2019 22:02 · Andrew Griffin]

Here's a decent, excitable explanation of BGP, if you want to know about the technology that might be the cause of the outage. It's not like there's Instagram to distract you, at least.

It includes some of the really important bits if the issue is what we think it is. As the video explains, this is a system that both runs on and manages trust: like with any routing system, it needs people to agree on things, and if someone starts messing about with it – accidentally or intentionally – the fact that it relies on people co-operating means that messing about can quickly and dramatically cause problems elsewhere and for other people.

[13 March 2019 22:08 · Andrew Griffin]

You can get in touch on Twitter if you'd like to, I'm on @_andrew_griffin. You're particularly encouraged to if you have any way of explaining what's going on! But you're very welcome to come along and hang out, if you like – it's not like any of us have anything better to do.

[13 March 2019 22:11 · Andrew Griffin]

Here's the latest story from Associated Press, which does a helpful job of rounding everything up:

Facebook says it is aware of outages on its platforms including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram and is working to resolve the issue. 

According to downdetector.com, which monitors websites, the outages started around 12 p.m. EDT on Wednesday in parts of the U.S., including the East and West Coast, parts of Europe and elsewhere. Both Facebook's desktop site and app appeared to be affected. Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for "required maintenance." 

Facebook did not say what was causing the outages. As of 4:45 EDT service was restored to some but other users were still reporting problems. 

Via its Twitter account, Facebook said the outage was not due to a "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attack, a type of attack that hackers use to interrupt service to a site.

[13 March 2019 22:14 · Andrew Griffin]

If you want to read about the breakdown of another service the world relies on, that seems unable to fulfil its most basic functions, that everyone wants to get free of but nobody knows how, that seems just incapable of doing the thing everyone who uses it wants from it – well, here's the latest on the UK government and Brexit.

[13 March 2019 22:17 · Andrew Griffin]

Just want to re-up this post from earlier, which remains the closest we've got yet to knowing what's actually going on.

[13 March 2019 22:25 · Andrew Griffin]

You have to wonder how much ammunition this will give to the people who argue that Facebook is too powerful, and that it should be broken up. Four of the world's biggest communication apps – together accounting for a stunning proportion of people's internet use – are all down together, at the same time, because they're run by the same company.

It's a reminder that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have a vast amount of power, and haven't been all that transparent about how they're going to use it. That power is what has led some regulators, lawmakers and other authorities to threaten the company with regulation and the prospect of breaking it up.

Mark Zuckerberg does seem concerned about this prospect. His much-discussed, very long blog post recently about combining the three services into one loosely defined, "private" social network appeared to be a response to it, and an attempt to make regulators less concerned.