Facebook and Instagram went down, the world spectacularly failed to end

Facebook check ins

Facebook check ins

Facebook experienced an outage that lasted roughly 40 minutes this morning. The social media giant’s Instagram service was also inaccessible. Instagram said on its Twitter account that it was aware of an outage and was working to fix it. It is worth noting that WhatsApp, the chat app that is owned by Facebook, was not affected by the outage. The repercussions were however felt by apps that rely on Facebook for user log-in, such as Tinder.

People in Singapore, Australia, Italy and South Africa were unable to log in and their feeds weren’t being updated and their Instagram photos were also not getting posted. What was frustrating was that it appeared that Facebook and Instagram were caught with their pants around their knees by the outage. There was no news of when the outage would end or the root cause. Its effects on the world were devastating. Life for some people was over.

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When Facebook woke up from the outage, it posted on its blog that “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can”.

Many users complained that they could not access the social network together with Instagram. Though my own Facebook was also down, Instagram seemed to be fine. The social network reportedly went down at around 11:50 AM IST on Tuesday. Facebook shows an error message, saying, “sorry, something went wrong” or the connection to it gets timed out.

During the outage, an old Dinosaur, Twitter crawled its way back to life, as many people took to it to lament. From where people were tweeting from, the outage seems to have affected many parts of the world.

It was not all gloom however as some of the tweets about the outage were hilarious and some were the stuff conspiracies are made of.

Some people took a different approach and used the outage as an opportunity to promote art because when Facebook and Instagram are operational, cats and food pictures are art.

It is not clear why Facebook and Instagram were down. And for now the North Korea suggestion is just that: a suggestion. If anything is to be taken from the outage it is that life without Facebook and Instagram is not worth much.

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