INSTAGRAM & FACEBOOK GOES DOWN FOR 2 HOURS ; GLOBAL OUTRAGE.

Were you kicked out of your Instagram and Facebook accounts too while scrolling? Did you freak out too when you felt your account was hacked? Well, you weren’t alone. On Tuesday evening, a global outage was faced by netizens while scrolling through Meta owned applications. The disruption affected millions of netizens resulting in accessing both Instagram and Facebook. 

Andy Stone, Communications Director at Meta, took to X ( formerly Twitter ), on Tuesday, 5th March, in order to address the widespread difficulties that the users were facing in accessing the company’s services. He acknowledged the problem by saying, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”

Almost 20 years ago, Facebook got famous on college campuses as a platform for students to stay in touch. Then came Twitter ( now X ), where people posted about their productive lives and Instagram, where friends shared photos as updates for their long-lost friends. Social media is, in innumerable ways, becoming less social. With the increase of youth’s addiction with this form of entertainment, even applications like Instagram and YouTube had to come up with “Its Late, You Need To Take A Break” reminders. With the large upswing of consumers, the biggest sites have become increasingly “corporatized.” Henceforth, the user-interface and business models are being commodified with the brimming users making technical issues and crashes occur frequently. 

Meta, the parent company of several apps like Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. announced on Wednesday, 6th March, that all the services have been fully restored after the global outage and issued an apology as well for the inconvenience caused by the same. Andy Stone acknowledged the technical issue and how it caused difficulty in accessing applications whilst ensuring users that it had been resolved as quickly as possible.

The sudden disruption prompted frustration and chaos among users who rely on the platforms for their daily dose of entertainment. While many of the netizens expressed a sense of relief with the sporadic progress in the restoration of services, some of them took to social media to share their experiences by putting up memes. Various bugs that were reported by users were, being logged out of their accounts, failure in refreshing feeds, stories and comments with loading for some. 

Real Time outage monitoring platform Down detector showcased the statistics of more than 15,000 people in India reporting that Facebook is suffering an outage, while more than 20,000 users have reported a crash on Instagram. All across the internet, posts with #instagramdown, #facebookdown were flashing leading to a meme fest on apps. Some people even called it a “#cyberattack” along with various other memes on how they always resort to Twitter ( now X ) in order to cross check with the Meta service crashes. 

The meme fest reached to an extent where the owner of X, Elon Musk, also joined in to take a dig at Meta by saying, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.” Musk is renowned for being very active about issues across the web and his platform remained operational during the whole chaos. Making clever use of the opportunity, the X-boss was swift to shoot his shot in showcasing the “superiority” of his platform.