Facebook down - live updates: Company explains outage as WhatsApp, Instagram and other apps come back online

Over at Down Detector – a website we’re probably all becoming very familiar with today – reports of issues at carriers and internet networks are surging. In the US, that’s T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T and others; in the UKit’s Virgin Media, BT, Vodafone, Sky and more.

But it’s probably because Facebook is down, which in turn means Instagram and WhatsApp are down, which in turn means that almost everything a lot of people do with their phone is broken. So it looks like the internet as a whole is broken. But it’s not.

Here’s our full story.

At least Twitter is enjoying itself. It has responded to the outage from its official account.

Our full story is here.

What’s going on, and when will it stop? Well – nobody really knows. But here’s our best guess.

Read the full explainer here.

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There were reports last week that WhatsApp was about to stop working on a range of old phones. They turned out to be a little misleading: while it is about to cut off support for phones with older operating systems, the list of devices that it supposedly affected was incorrect. You can read all about that here.

But that’s unconnected to this. It doesn’t come into effect until 1 November, anyway. But hopefully it’s an interesting story to read while you wait for it to come back online.

Here’s a very simple version of one of the problems that Facebook is having: its domain name system, or DNS, is not working. That might be a symptom or it might be the cause – we should find out soon enough – but it is the reason that when you type “Facebook.com” into your browser, the computer is unable to have that converted into the actual data that makes up the Facebook website.

On Friday, it was Slack. Today it’s Facebook – and also Facebook Workplace. These tools we’re already much relied on, but since the advent of widespread home working, they can put whole offices out of operation.

Here’s our story on the Slack outage the other day.

Questions are often asked about cyber attacks after an event like this. But while they can point that way, that can also add to confusion, cautions Jake Moore, the former head of digital forensics at Dorset Police and now cybersecurity specialist at global cybersecurity firm, ESET.

“Outages are increasing in volume and can often point towards a cyber-attack, but this can add to the confusion early on when we are diagnosing the causes,” he said.

“As we saw with Fastly in the summer, web-blackouts are more often originate from undiscovered software bug or even human error. 

“Although these are increasing in frequency and require more failsafes in place, predicting these issues is increasingly more difficult as it was never thought possible before”.

The NYT’s Ryan Mac reports that, since everything is broken, Facebook employees are taking the equivalent of a “snow day”.

An update from WhatsApp’s Twitter means that all the different apps have now commented on the problem. (All slightly differently.) Here’s WhatsApp’s: