Facebook And Instagram Went Down, And People Had Some Feelings About It
Sometime on Wednesday, March 13, you might have tried to log into Facebook. Maybe you wanted to check in on your internet friends. Or maybe you just needed to mindlessly scroll for a bit. Maybe you had a witty post ready to go! You fired up your app and waited for it to load. And you waited. You waited some more. Finally, your newsfeed populates your screen, hooray! But wait … what is this? Why are all the posts you see hours old? No mind, probably some newsfeed setting you need to check. You type out your status update, maybe add an emoji or two, and hit post. You hit post again. Clear the box and hit post again. And again. Still nothing. “Eh”, you think. “I’ll just pop over to Instagram and see what’s poppin’ there”. What was poppin’ was a whole lot of nothing. Crickets.
The Great Facebook Outage of 2019 was upon us, and for pretty much an entire day, FB and IG were inaccessible for a whole lot of people. No posts. No FB fights. All those meals and photos and racist messages rife with typos – no one could share them. It took a while for news to spread, because news spreads on FB and IG and, well, you know. Some of the most popular social media platforms in the world had gone dark. And that left a lot of people wondering what the hell they were actually supposed to do with their time. Most users’ access was restored by midnight EST on March 14. So of course they took to Facebook to share their thoughts about a day without Facebook. We will say this: Productivity probably skyrocketed on Wednesday.
When Facebook goes down, a lot goes down. No Instagram. No What’s App. Messenger? Nah. It’s like the Dark Ages. When it came back, they announced (obviously) on Facebook.
Facebook announcing on Facebook that Facebook is back is so meta it’s making our brains hurt. Also, it’s kind of funny that FB is on FB. The social media giant blamed a server configuration change for the massive outage, although they seemed to downplay how many people were affected. We don’t know about you guys, but our feeds were tumbleweeds for the entire day! Apparently some people still had access, which was probably very weird and very lonely for those people. Just sitting there, waiting for their friends to come back.
Once they were up and running again, people had some feelings about the whole ordeal. And jokes! Man, there were so many jokes. So what did people do with all their free time on Wednesday? Besides obsessively check Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App to see if they were working again, we mean. We waxed poetic about a brief time without social media distractions. We got A LOT done. Some people yearned for the simpler days of MySpace. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We’re glad to be back.
When Facebook went down, we had to actually do stuff. It was gross.
People’s productivity spiked on Wednesday, no doubt about it. Laundry was put away. Work actually got done. There were actual face-to-face conversations. It was THE WORST.
Somewhere, Tom Anderson was laughing his ass off.
Listen, sometimes we miss the days of MySpace. It was simple and fun! MySpace didn’t go dark for hours, leaving us detached from the outside world. MySpace cared.
If you ate a meal on Wednesday and couldn’t share it on Facebook or Instagram, did you even really eat it?
So many plates of artfully arranged food and no one to share it with! We’re imagining a bunch of people just sitting around, staring at their lunch or smoothie or acai bowl, wondering if it’s OK to eat it without bragging about it first. Thoughts and prayers.
Just think of all the outrage we had to swallow on Wednesday.
We sort of feel bad for the poor, unsuspecting people who were accosted in public places by old people wanting to fight about stuff. The lady in the grocery store doesn’t care about your friend’s cousin’s wife’s sister’s co-worker’s problems, lady.
“Server configuration” was the official reason for the outage. Sure, Facebook. Sure.
Listen Facebook, we’ve all been there. When your internet goes down or the power goes out and you sit there trying to remember if you paid the bill. Fingers crossed it’s a problem that isn’t the direct result of your empty bank account, right?
