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

[14 March 2019 01:56 · Andrew Griffin]

A couple of hours ago, Facebook introduced some new products built around music and video. Doesn't seem like the best time to be doing so, really, but here it is to read about if you wish.

[14 March 2019 01:57 · Andrew Griffin]

Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier has suggested that Facebook might offer refunds to advertisers affected by the outage. (She's also calculated that analysts expect Facebook to make $190 million per day this year; those could be some expensive refunds.)

[14 March 2019 02:03 · Andrew Griffin]

It's now 10 hours since Facebook first posted its update about "increased error rates" on its status page. That's four times as long as the previous record outage.

[14 March 2019 02:04 · Andrew Griffin]

The number of problems reported on Instagram has leapt up, according to Down Detector. Hopefully this is the calm before the storm, or the brief moment during which they had to unplug everything before plugging it back in again.

[14 March 2019 02:12 · Andrew Griffin]

Google searches for both "Facebook down" and "Instagram down" have dropped off in the last 20 minutes or so. Could mean fewer problems; could mean everyone now knows there's no point trying. But we'll probably find out soon...

[14 March 2019 02:18 · Andrew Griffin]

Anthony Mosseri, head of Instagram, has tweeted about his day.

"Running from meeting to meeting in Tokyo and getting updates from the team, who's working tirelessly back home, on the issues," he wrote. "Today is a lot harder for them than for me."

[14 March 2019 02:22 · Andrew Griffin]

Google searches for "Instagram down" are now just over half where they were an hour ago, if that means anything...

[14 March 2019 02:31 · Andrew Griffin]

More and more people are suggesting that Instagram is coming back.

[14 March 2019 02:33 · Andrew Griffin]

At the same time, Google searches are still falling. I think we might be on our way out of this hellhole!

[14 March 2019 02:35 · Andrew Griffin]

(There's still no update on Facebook's platform page, or any of the official accounts.)