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
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.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
Here's our latest round-up to get you up to speed on everything's not working
A strange thing about the current outage is that it follows major problems with Gmail and other Google products overnight. Again, it's not clear that any of these things are necessarily connected yet – but it's certainly been a very difficult day for the people who make sure websites are online, whatever is happening.
Facebook has acknowledged the problems, though it's given no detail on what is causing them or when they might be fixed.
"We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," it wrote. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."
They've been ongoing for an hour and they've not said anymore, either.
As well as the wide variety of websites that are suffering issues, Down Detector is now showing people having problems with Century Link, the US internet and TV provider.
Facebook has confirmed that what's happening is not a DDoS attack, though it hasn't said what it actually is.
A DDoS attack – short for distributed denial of service – is when a whole host of computers all send traffic at one particular place in the internet, overloading it and (if successful) taking it offline.
Facebook's denial that it is one means that it could be a whole host of other things: a problem with its own servers, its code or an issue with another part of the infrastructure of the internet.
It does however seem to make it less likely that something intentional is going on, such as an attack by hackers or a state actor.
The rumours about a DDoS attack appear to have come from one Twitter user, though it would also be one of the obvious explanations for such an extreme, immediate and widespread outage.
(Facebook's statement that the outage is "not related to a DDoS attack" isn't going down well on Twitter. Just about every reply is from someone conspiratorially (and baselessly) suggesting that them saying so actually means that it is something to do with a DDoS attack.)
The outage appears to be getting worse, according to Down Detector. Facebook, Instagram and to a lesser extent WhatsApp are all still having big troubles; other non-Facebook apps including Twitter seem to be having problems as well.
It's important to note that not everyone is having these problems: some people can still get on Facebook, Instagram and the other affected services, and some of them can do so without any problems at all. It's not clear what's deciding if you can or can't.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments