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.
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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.
OMG Facebook and Instagram are down WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?!!!
— BBC Radio1 Breakfast (@R1Breakfast) January 27, 2015
How we feel when Facebook goes down. #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/7jOhzHrevq
— marie claire SA (@marieclaire_sa) January 27, 2015
Read more: 5 big security threats you could face in 2015
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.
Faceboook and Instagram are down….. WORLWIDE!!! 🙁 :3 So this is what apocalyse look like. pic.twitter.com/dNaYbnHRJg
— Ronnie Lalas (@ronnielalas) January 27, 2015
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.
#TuesdayTrends – How are we supposed to eat our breakfasts with #instagramdown ? We this and more trends on social media this morning
— Hashtag Radio (@HashtagRadio) January 27, 2015
#instagramdown ok. I feel lost without Instagram. How do you expect teenagers to survive? Damn it pic.twitter.com/bk3x0jehWs
— Marooner+Stormer=ME (@peanutmarooner) January 27, 2015
I’m wearing an earlybird filtered ribbon in honor of everyone affected by the loss of #Instagram. #instagramdown
— Hannah Joiner Crosby (@hannahjoiner) January 27, 2015
North Korea, is that you? #facebookdown
— ScoopWhoop (@ScoopWhoopNews) January 27, 2015
whys everyone heated about how facebook and instagram are down b you know you can still google pictures of fish
— BILL_NYE_THO (@Bill_Nye_Tho__) January 27, 2015
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.
Since Faceboook is down. Allow me to introduce Masquerade by John Doyle. large oil on http://t.co/4D31hH4El2 pic.twitter.com/SaAiXif6nt
— Chuck Wolf (@cwolfbv) September 3, 2014
