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

Facebook, Instagram, Etsy and US postal taken down amid major outages

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

[14 March 2019 00:35 · Andrew Griffin]

Apparently because they've got nothing better to do, the Boston Red Sox are giving away baseball tickets.

[14 March 2019 00:41 · Andrew Griffin]

To repeat something from earlier, because it seems to be something a lot of people are running into: deleting or logging out doesn't seem to help fix any of the affected apps. It definitely seems to be a connection problem, so there's no way to reset it like this.

One thing that might work, however, is trying to get into the app or the particular function you want through other means. So Instagram's website appears to be working OK, for instance, though of course it has very limited features when compared to the app. And some people have had success posting to Facebook using the special "Pages" app that is made for people who run big accounts, if those aren't letting you post through the normal app or website.

[14 March 2019 00:42 · Andrew Griffin]

Me too.

[14 March 2019 00:47 · Andrew Griffin]

Here's a whole host of other celebrities who are also mad at Instagram.

[14 March 2019 00:48 · Andrew Griffin]

And for some reason sports teams are especially annoyed, too.

[14 March 2019 00:51 · Andrew Griffin]

It's now six hours since Facebook posted on Twitter that it was "focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible", and we've not heard from them again.

Sheesh indeed!

[14 March 2019 00:55 · Andrew Griffin]

  ↵Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been thwarted by the continuing Instagram outage.

[14 March 2019 01:00 · Andrew Griffin]

Nearly 10,000 people have replied to Facebook's last tweet about the outage. That's more people than have retweeted it.

[14 March 2019 01:02 · Andrew Griffin]

I think Cardi is trying to wind us up. And it's working!

(She posted that five minutes ago and more than 1,000 people have already replied. Most of them appear to be very stressed out.) 

[14 March 2019 01:09 · Andrew Griffin]

Here's the latest wrap from the Associated Press, which should get you up to date if you're just joining us:

Facebook says it is aware of outages on its platforms including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram and is working to resolve the issue. 

According to Facebook's status page , the outages started around 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. That page, which calls the problem a "partial outage," states that Facebook has experienced "increased error rates" since that time. 

Downdetector.com, a site that monitors site outages, said the Facebook problem affected parts of the U.S., including the East and West Coast; parts of Europe and elsewhere. Both Facebook's desktop site and app appeared to be affected. Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for "required maintenance." 

Facebook did not say what was causing the outages. 

Via its Twitter account, Facebook said the outage was not due to a "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attack, a type of attack that hackers use to interrupt service to a site.