Service has been restored on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – but the company insists it hasn’t been hacked
BY SOPHIE CURTIS
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all back online and working as normal after a 14-hour outage <www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breaking-facebook-instagram-down-across-14130259> left many users unable to post updates.
Facebook <www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/facebook> and Instagram <www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/instagram> both started experiencing difficulty at around 4pm GMT on March 13, according to data from website Downdetector, which monitors online outages.
Error messages on both sites stated: “Oops… Something went wrong. We’re working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.” [image: 0_Screen-Shot-2019-03-14-at-083618.png][image: 0_Screen-Shot-2019-03-14-at-083554.png]
Many users took to other social networks such as Twitter <www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/twitter> to vent their frustration at being unable to access the online services.
The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were used more than 150,000 times.
WhatsApp users also started reporting issues from around 6pm GMT, with some users claiming they were unable to send messages. [image: 0_Screen-Shot-2019-03-14-at-083517.png]
Responding to rumours posted on other social networks, Facebook said the outages were not a result of a cyber attack.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” Facebook said in a statement sent to Mirror Online at 7pm last night.
“We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.”
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is a type of cyber attack that involves flooding a website with extremely high volumes of traffic
