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

Here's Instagram's latest tweet, which arrived more than an hour ago now.

There's another Facebook app that's down, and which you might not have thought of  – Oculus, the VR company that it bought.

Users say it isn't possible to access the online store, or the multiplayer parts of the service.

There are also problems with the "Login with Facebook" service, which lets you use your Facebook account to get into other platforms like Spotify and Tinder.

It appears that anything that was logged in when the outage began is fine, and will stay logged in. But new attempts to log in won't work, or at least not in every case: users will see a warning that the tool isn't working, and will be asked to try again later, leaving them locked out.

Some breaking news from Reuters, which has nothing to do with the outage but plenty to do with Facebook users:

U.S. prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook Inc struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, the paper reported without naming them, citing two people familiar with the requests.

The two companies are among more than 150, including Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Microsoft Corp , that have entered into partnerships with Facebook for access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users, according to the report.

I think this is the longest Facebook outage ever. It seems like the previous holder of that record was this big problem in 2010, when it went offline for two-and-a-half hours.

If you click that link, it'll take you to the post Facebook engineers shared at the time. (I'm not sure they'll do that this time around; it was a different world back then, Facebook was young and transparent.)

It's worth taking a look in part because the explanation is so detailed and dull, at least probably to most people. If we ever know what caused this one, it's likely to be something equally technical and specific: it's far more likely a minor coding error gone awry than it is a major attack by a nation state, or something similarly dramatic.

Police in New Zealand have tweeted to ask that people don't call them about the outage. They say it was a pre-emptive thing – but done because people have made such calls in the past.

It's now exactly five hours since Facebook last posted on Twitter about the problems. It's six hours since the note on Facebook's platform status page was last updated. Everything has gone quite quiet.

For context, you could fit TWO of the previous outages into just the time since Facebook last tweeted. (As below, I think it was 2.5 hours in 2010.) And the problem had already been ongoing for a good while when it posted that last announcement!

I joked earlier that this might never end. But, you know, what if it doesn't? If Facebook can break for six hours, why not six days? And if six days, why not six weeks? Why not six months, six years? We accept that Facebook grew up out of nothing – a weird website that Mark Zuckerberg made to rate the hotness of his classmates that accidentally became the biggest internet service in the world, over just a few years – so what if it could disappear back into nothing just as dramatically?

The morning has arrived in places like Australia and Japan, so they're starting to be reflected on the outage map. Everyone's going to sleep in the UK, and that's disappearing. So here's the latest, as it looks for Instagram – but beware this basically seems to mean that there are problems just about anywhere that people are awake...

According to Down Detector, the problems started around 4pm UK time. That's more than eight hours ago...