Social media services Facebook and its family apps WhatsApp and Instagram were inaccessible for around six hours on Monday. All the Facebook apps which include Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Oculus, started displaying some error messages to all its users around 9 p.m. IST, according to the users. And after some time Facebook disappeared from the internet. This shutdown of the social media apps lasted over 5 to 6 hours and gradually some apps were able to be accessed by the users. But still, the company informed us that the data services will take time to work fully.
But this outage made a big impact which was severe. Facebook is surely a link spin platform that includes messaging live streaming and many other digital services mostly in India. Around 3.5 billion people use Facebook Instagram messenger on WhatsApp to communicate with everyone and also for other business and advertising purposes. Facebook also acts as a way to sign in to many other apps and services so this outage of Facebook leads to unexpected effects such as not being able to sign in to others smart TV, thermostats, shopping websites, and many other digital services.
While mentioning the reason for this outage the company said that some internal technical issue has caused this and it has also affected Facebook services employees’ work passes and emails. Facebook clarified that this was caused due to the changes to its internet infrastructure which helps to coordinate the traffic between its data centers. These interrupted communications were a spreader to other data centers and this what’s the reason that brought the services of the company to a halt. According to some sources, the reason that it took longer to fix was that the people who were trying to figure out the reason behind this outage were not able to physically get into the building. Facebook said that this change affected companies’ internal tools and many systems which complicated the attempts to solve the problem.
But when the outage began on Monday all the Facebook and Instagram users quickly turned to Twitter and Twitter was filled with lots of memes. Even other brands such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Twitter itself started poking some fun at the inability to use the apps.
As everyone switched to Twitter, the official account of Twitter made a tweet welcoming everyone and wrote, “Hello literally everyone”, to which Starbucks replied, “the perfect time for a coffee break.”Â
When McDonald’s tweeted, “Hi what can I get u”, to which Twitter jokingly replied, “59.6 million nuggets for my friends.” Just McDonald’s and Twitter having a pointed conversation without mentioning Facebook or its sibling services.Â
Referring to MySpace (earlier it was one of the largest social networking sites) Mercedes F1 team wrote, “One minute. Just trying to find the Mercedes MySpace password.”
An American regulator pointed out this outage and also pushed out some fire safety measures by tweeting, “favorite app not working? Open the app of LIFE and stand up to check and see if your smoke alarm is working.”
Even Netflix posted a meme, which pointed out how users are switching up to Twitter while their favorite apps are down. Netflix memed up with Squid Game, it’s a Korean hit show.
Snickers also joined the trend by tweeting, “maybe Facebook and Instagram just need a Snickers” indicating that they needed a break.Â
Zomato made a funny tweet by addressing Instagram and wrote, “it’s ok Instagram, surviving Mondays is tough.Â
Cc:- WhatsApp”.
The services were down from about 9 pm IST until around 3:30 am on Tuesday.
