Facebook goes down, taking Instagram and WhatsApp with it – follow live | Technology

A ‘cascade’ of costly outages around the world

Billions of users were potentially directly affected by the outages of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp today. But Facebook’s different platforms are also the basis for small businesses around the world, meaning that small stores, restaurants and delivery services across time zones lost money today, the New York Times reported.

In Ireland, it was a clothing business that sells its products via Facebook and Instagram that felt the effects, with one founder telling the New York Times, “Missing out on four or five hours of sales could be the difference between paying the electricity bill or rent for the month.”

“My whole business is down,” the owner of a food delivery service in Delhi told the newspaper.

The social media site is once again loading for some users, including CNN’s Oliver Darcy, and me.

The company told the New York Times it is starting to see the sites coming back online, but they may not be immediately accessible for all global users.

The Facebook founder’s personal wealth has shrunk by more than $6bn in just a few hours today, Bloomberg reports, as Facebook stock has dropped in the wake of mysterious global outages of Facebook platforms and a whistleblower’s allegations that Facebook’s internal policies have betrayed democracy and helped facilitate disinformation and ethnic violence.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index listed Mark Zuckerberg’s network as almost $140bn a few weeks ago, but it dropped to only $121.6bn as of early this afternoon, Bloomberg reported.

Live coverage: Why is Facebook down around the globe?

This is Lois Beckett, here with live coverage of Facebook’s global outage from our West Coast office in Los Angeles.

We’ll be updating with updates as we have them. Here’s what we know so far:

• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for large numbers of people more than five hours ago, with the the website downdetector.com citing at least 5.6m reports about issues with the company’s services from around the world.
• The outage has brought down all of Facebook’s apps “globally”, The Verge reported, “affecting billions of users and millions of advertisers”.
• Within Facebook, even as engineers are being deployed to fix the problem, the outage has disrupted most of the internal systems employees need to communicate with each other and do their jobs, the Verge reported.
• Facebook’s platforms acknowledged that “some people” were having issues accessing its services, but provided no immediate explanation for the problem. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted more than five hours ago.
• The crisis comes as Facebook is already facing intense scrutiny about its policies after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who worked on the company’s civic integrity team, went public with a series of damning allegations, including saying that “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world”, and calling the company’s policy choices “a betrayal of democracy”.

We’ll have more soon.