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

Over on the Down Detector outage tracking site, there's no sense that the problems are going away for Facebook:

(That apparent drop at the very right-hand side is just because it hasn't been filled in yet; I don't think it's been fixed.)

The Instagram chart is even more concerning, apparently just continuing to go upwards.

And WhatsApp is still bad, too. Though not quite as bad as the others.

The same trend can be seen in the searches for each of the apps over the last day:

(The same caveat as below applies with that bit at the very end; it's because it's not filled in, not because it's fixed.)

Here's a cat who seems very confused about why I'm still sat on the sofa/his bed and who I think wants Instagram to go back online as much as anyone else.

I know that feel.

It's now been eight hours since Facebook said it was "working to resolve the issue as soon as possible".

I think – and whisper it, I don't want to jinx it – I think it might be getting a little better? Facebook's outage graph has been improving over the last hour or so, and Instagram has stopped getting worse, which is progress of a kind.

Searches on Google Trends don't seem to be dropping off yet, and it might be a false alarm:

But here's the outage graph from Down Detector. This is for Facebook, which admittedly is the most optimistic-looking of the lot.

(It's worth noting that Down Detector works in part by tracking mentions of problems on different social networks like Twitter – so it might simply be that fewer people are complaining, not that the problems are getting less prevalent.)

Here's a longer write-up of the simultaneous, but separate, other issue that Facebook is having:

U.S. federal 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 newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the requests and without naming the companies.

Both companies are among the 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.

Facebook is facing a slew of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries over its privacy practices, including ongoing investigations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state agencies in New York.

In addition to looking at the data deals, the probes focus on disclosures that the company shared the user data of 87 million people with Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that worked with U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign.

Facebook said it was cooperating with investigators in multiple federal probes, without addressing the grand jury inquiry specifically.

"We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged that we will continue to do so," Facebook said in a statement.

Facebook has defended the data-sharing deals, first reported in December, saying none of the partnerships gave companies access to information without people's permission.

A spokesman for the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, which The New York Times reported is overseeing the inquiry, said he could not confirm or deny the probe.

I perhaps spoke too soon about it maybe being fixed..