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

We're coming up on five hours of problems. This is probably going to be the site's biggest outage ever, and by the end is probably going to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues.

On Twitter, regular users are gleefully, bitterly welcoming in all of those forced to take solace from Instagram and Facebook:

  ↵It's getting to be bedtime here in the UK, and this tweet from Northern Crumble poses a question a lot of people are probably asking themselves: go to sleep and hope everything's fixed in the morning, or wait out a little longer in the hope of catching a look at your newsfeed tonight?

It's not a question that I can really answer. We're really into uncharted territories here; Facebook outages rarely last this long, or are this weird.

But it's been five hours now. There's no reason it won't be six, or seven, or even eight or nine. (I suppose we can't be absolutely certain that it will ever come back, though I don't think Facebook is going away that easy.) Your best bet is probably to go to sleep, I think, and be fresh-faced in the morning ready for checking feed – or complete frenzy when we realise Facebook is still down.

That said, I'll be here, waiting and willing it to come back. So feel free to wait it out with me.

  ↵Soulja Boy is still using the outage to promote his app, by the way. It doesn't seem to have been hit by any network issues of its own. Here's his latest post, which includes links to download it and get online. (I haven't used it or checked it out, so this is definitely not an endorsement.)

There was some concern, earlier on, that other platforms might be down. That included Twitter, which definitely was – and maybe still is – having problems, according to Down Detector:

But my hunch (and it is purely a hunch) is that these problems are just the consequence of a whole load of people signing up for Twitter accounts or reviving old ones to fill the time while they're not able to get on to Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

If you go on Twitter yourself this seems to be the case: there's a whole host of people noting that they've gone on to it for the first time in ages, just to find out if another social network isn't working.

There's a similar, if less extreme, pattern to complaints about problems on Snapchat:

My guess is that both of those apps are enjoying much higher than usual traffic, and all the associated problems as well as excitement that comes with it. The reported problems could just be a coincidence.

Here's a piece from the Associated Press, about a new report that suggests Facebook and other big tech companies have got too big for their own good, and need to be broken up. It's a compelling argument on a night like tonight.

Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are once again being cast as monopolies that have become too powerful for society's good, a recurring theme that's increasing the pressure to rein them in. 

A 150-page report commissioned by the British government depicts big digital companies in search, social media, advertising and e-commerce as threats to competition, innovation and personal privacy. Meanwhile, the music streaming service Spotify filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Apple, accusing it of stifling competition through its control over the iPhone's operating system and app store. 

Wednesday's dual attacks provide more fodder in a worldwide debate about whether stricter rules need to be drawn up to handcuff or even break up leading tech companies as they try to extend their tentacles into new markets. 

"What you're seeing is a broad recognition that there is a problem," said Matt Stoller, a fellow at Open Markets, an institution that studies corporate monopolies and advocates for more competitive markets. 

In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren last week proposed breaking up the biggest U.S. tech companies, saying they have too much market and political power. 

That high-profile missive further emboldened long-time critics such as former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He likens Facebook, Google and Amazon to "robber barons" who built vast business empires on innovations in the late 19th century, in what became known as the Gilded Era.

That piece mentions Elizabeth Warren's recent arguments about breaking up Facebook. Her presidential campaign this week said it had run ads on Facebook itself criticising its monopoly – which were then taken down. It was a strange moment that you can read about here, including very relevant remarks about the dangers of having a tech industry dominated by one huge company.

There's more than a tweet per second on the #WhatsAppDown hashtag at the moment, and similar torrents on #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown. You can just imagine how irritating that must be for those in Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters – tens of thousands of people making fun of them , all on a rival app. Though they've probably also got bigger things to be worrying about today.

A useful tweet here from @Lovell, who points out that a useful Twitter account that tracks problems with BGP* hasn't registered any of the sort of problems that might suggest that it is an explanation for the current outage.

So it might be back to the drawing board. It's possible we'll never actually know!

* See earlier posts for an explanation of what this is, and why I'd mentioned it as a possible explanation.

Just to confirm:

• Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are still having problems, according to Down Detector.
• Facebook's own platform status page confirms it is seeing "increased error rates".
• The Facebook official Twitter account – which posted about the problems five hours ago – is still yet to suggest there is any breakthrough
• and people are still reporting problems

So it looks like everything is still very much down. Some users are able to get online, either as normal or with just some specific functions not working – but that's been the same all day.