Monday in the office was long for Facebook, as the social media giant with 1.9 billion daily active users faced an outage for a good chunk of the day. For about six hours, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Workplace were all down, affecting too many people.
But the internet has a weapon unlike any other to battle such a crisis by making hilarious reaction memes and jokes on the way. And as any smart competitor would, Twitter saw a perfect time to enjoy its rare spotlight by tweeting “hello literally everyone,” from its main account. It garnered 2.4 million “likes” in just four hours.
Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a financial hit. According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg lost $6 billion in hours as Facebook plunged and dropped to No. 5 on the list of the world’s richest, below Gates.
So scroll down through the best of the outage reaction memes that will surely crack you up, because let me tell you, with Facebook or without, we’re all gonna be fine as long as we have that smashing sense of humor (outage-proof!).
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The outage yesterday marked the longest stretch of downtime for Facebook since 2008. The fact that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced significant issues for around six hours was a major event for many users. The director of analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik, Doug Madory commented to CNN on the incident: “I don't know If I've seen an outage like this before from a major internet firm," he said and added that when it comes to billions of users, “Facebook is the internet to them."
Only after 7 pm ET, around six hours after the platforms went offline, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a note on his Facebook page: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now” and added “Sorry for the disruption today—I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
“Facebook products being down for such a long time in the age of social media got everyone nervous and happy at the same time,” Lina Survila, a global tech PR and chief editor at Abstract Stylist, told Bored Panda, commenting on the global Facebook outage.
“First, everyone was able to gather in one place only, e.g., Twitter. So brands knew that most social media users would be hanging out there, or TikTok,” Lina said. As a result, many brands, businesses and companies took the outage as an opportunity rather than failure, Lina argues.
She added that McDonald's was a good example of this. “They knew where and when everyone would be gathering and just had to jump in with their occasional 'Hi, what can I get you?'. This shows the brand is alive and aware of the situation, making those profiles not only typical brand profiles, but showing people who are also locked out of their usual accounts,” Lina explained.
Facebook being down gives you the opportunity to actually learn something. Read a book for a change.
“The slow living, conscious and sustainable brands and companies also explored this as an opportunity to talk about the importance of social media breaks, mental health, and joking about people getting smarter because of this. In a similar way, productivity apps had the best opportunity to show people how much time they can save by not using social media.”
“Even traditional retail or coffee shops found the outage as a perfect moment to send people messages about their products and invite them to come over,” Lina added.
Moreover, from the communications perspective, this was perfect timing for witty jokes and memes that we have seen a lot of, Lina said. “Communication specialists were also made to rethink the necessity of owning your channels and subscriber lists,” as a result of the black-out screens of the internet giant.
Society right now
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, has released an update about the October 4th outage saying: “The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem. Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” There was no specification what kind of configuration changes were implemented.
The outage happened only a day after the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” It turns out, it was a former product manager for civic misinformation, Frances Haugen.
First reported in a series of Journal stories, the documents revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users. It also showed how Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things.
Moreover, on her personal website, Haugen stated that during her time at the company, she “became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety—putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous act to blow the whistle on Facebook.”
Haugen told in an interview for 60 Minutes that she has seen “a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.”
They've probably withered away and died, due to attention starvation.
Omgosh I swear Squid Game is like everywhere now and it’s flipping hilarious for some reason
Note: this post originally had 46 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
I did not even notice the service disruption but only read about it. Seems I am doing a few things right...
I would have noticed a BP service disruption probably before it even happened...
Load More Replies...I'm kinda embarrassed to admit I've got Facebook. I'm kinda proud to say I didn't notice it being down.
Same with Instagram, I guess it was a specific time?
Load More Replies...I didn’t notice this at all. I’m kind of surprised so many people use these services. Seems like an extra step to me when we already have phones and can just text people to communicate.
That shows an outstanding level of arrogance, "why do people like things that I don't?"
Load More Replies...I’m shocked no one called Twitter the victor of the social media hunger games
Bet you anything Facebook went down to do a purge of all offensive content—-i.e. destroy all evidence of wrongdoing—-ahead of today’s government hearing with the whistleblower. Kind of like when past shady companies saw that the party was over, and it was time to fire up the crosscut shredders and incinerators ahead of law enforcement arriving with a warrant.
Wow! it's October 5, 2021, 7:07 am EST. This post is the first I've heard of Facebook going down. I'm not sure but...I think... I win!!
Still laughing at the BBC new report that is due to "someone fiddling with the settings in a router" like the routers used are akin to a domestic broadband router with a web configuration page. Like seriously, do you think they deploy changes to thousands of routers by hand? Somebody messed up the configuration yes, but it likely went through several rounds of testing before being deployed onto production kit. This is when they would have discovered that the test environment isn't representative of production and all hell was let loose when they discovered that they then couldn't connect to the borked kit to rollback the changes. On top of that, if it was affected automatic routing, then the changes could easily affect kit beyond that which actually had changes made to it! This is going to make great story on the "how I screwed up as an intern"!
These days anyone will believe anything. If someone said it was the tooth fairy, you can trust that by the end of the day there would be wanted photos of the tooth fairy on every website, all ya gotta add is the media and a hashtag and then it's fact.
Load More Replies...I never even noticed - wouldn't have known if twitter went down too lol
people when facebook, whatsapp, and instagram is down :( vs people when tiktok is down :0
Kinda suspect that FB goes down just as that whistleblower report comes out.
46 images and not one of Tumblr blogs sending sacrifices to the net gods as thanks for the blood. Disappointing.
Two things happened. 1. I have learned that FB/IG were down only next day from television. 2. Apparently, there's this new cult, called Squid Games, but i couldn't be arsed to google it.
They used that downtime to install more spyware... Some people even called 911 to complain about those services being down!
First I heard about FB being down was last night, in the car, listening to public radio. Second time I heard about it was today (Thursday) when I read this post. I don't get why people are so addicted. For those who use it to log in to some unconnected app instead of creating an account, did you not ever consider this possibility? It's obvious that this could happen and then you would not be able to log in. As for people who rely on FB for communication because there isn't much of an other option (I heard that's the case in some countries - India for example - ) that's terrible. I really hope that your situation improves. Relying on a for-profit company for basic communication means that something that should be a public utility has been privatized for profits.
HI EVERYONE ON BOREDPANDA I HAVE AUTISM AND ADHD AND LIVE IN PAERATA PUKEKOHE AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND I USE WHATSAPP A LOT SO WHEN IT WAS DOWN I THOGHT THAT IT WAS MY INTERNET CONNECTION BECAUSE ME AND MY FAMILY LIVE IN A RURAL AREA SO I TURNED IT OFF AND ON A FEW TIMES THEN UNISTALLED IT AND REINSTALLED IT TRYED TO LOG IN DIDN'T WORK SO I HAD TO EMAIL MY DAD ON OUTLOOK BECAUSE MY DAD HASN'T TOPPED UP MY CREDIT YET SO EMAILING WAS IT
.....I need to socialize more, this is the first I've heard of it....on the site I go to for pet photos.
Hope you've seen Squid Games to catch the jokes. If not... watch. It is addicting and bingeable in a weekend. Lol
My work phone also wouldn't connect to the internet at all during this time, it's a Sony phone and it all seemed a bit strange.
I didn't notice they were down. That's because I'm not on any of them and I actually manage to live a full and happy life.
This is the crap you get when one douchbag is able to vertically integrate platforms.
Well, facebook! You did get the phone calls about your extended warranty!
I was using Discord instead at that time, missing WhatsApp wasn't bothering my work therefore, and the other two, i don't have.
I legit upgraded my phone this morning before I realized it was down. Then my conspiracy mind took over and was like what's really going on in the world that "they" didn't want the news to travel about? hmmm.....
They need to include Squid Game in title. Excellent references. Lol
I did not even notice the service disruption but only read about it. Seems I am doing a few things right...
I would have noticed a BP service disruption probably before it even happened...
Load More Replies...I'm kinda embarrassed to admit I've got Facebook. I'm kinda proud to say I didn't notice it being down.
Same with Instagram, I guess it was a specific time?
Load More Replies...I didn’t notice this at all. I’m kind of surprised so many people use these services. Seems like an extra step to me when we already have phones and can just text people to communicate.
That shows an outstanding level of arrogance, "why do people like things that I don't?"
Load More Replies...I’m shocked no one called Twitter the victor of the social media hunger games
Bet you anything Facebook went down to do a purge of all offensive content—-i.e. destroy all evidence of wrongdoing—-ahead of today’s government hearing with the whistleblower. Kind of like when past shady companies saw that the party was over, and it was time to fire up the crosscut shredders and incinerators ahead of law enforcement arriving with a warrant.
Wow! it's October 5, 2021, 7:07 am EST. This post is the first I've heard of Facebook going down. I'm not sure but...I think... I win!!
Still laughing at the BBC new report that is due to "someone fiddling with the settings in a router" like the routers used are akin to a domestic broadband router with a web configuration page. Like seriously, do you think they deploy changes to thousands of routers by hand? Somebody messed up the configuration yes, but it likely went through several rounds of testing before being deployed onto production kit. This is when they would have discovered that the test environment isn't representative of production and all hell was let loose when they discovered that they then couldn't connect to the borked kit to rollback the changes. On top of that, if it was affected automatic routing, then the changes could easily affect kit beyond that which actually had changes made to it! This is going to make great story on the "how I screwed up as an intern"!
These days anyone will believe anything. If someone said it was the tooth fairy, you can trust that by the end of the day there would be wanted photos of the tooth fairy on every website, all ya gotta add is the media and a hashtag and then it's fact.
Load More Replies...I never even noticed - wouldn't have known if twitter went down too lol
people when facebook, whatsapp, and instagram is down :( vs people when tiktok is down :0
Kinda suspect that FB goes down just as that whistleblower report comes out.
46 images and not one of Tumblr blogs sending sacrifices to the net gods as thanks for the blood. Disappointing.
Two things happened. 1. I have learned that FB/IG were down only next day from television. 2. Apparently, there's this new cult, called Squid Games, but i couldn't be arsed to google it.
They used that downtime to install more spyware... Some people even called 911 to complain about those services being down!
First I heard about FB being down was last night, in the car, listening to public radio. Second time I heard about it was today (Thursday) when I read this post. I don't get why people are so addicted. For those who use it to log in to some unconnected app instead of creating an account, did you not ever consider this possibility? It's obvious that this could happen and then you would not be able to log in. As for people who rely on FB for communication because there isn't much of an other option (I heard that's the case in some countries - India for example - ) that's terrible. I really hope that your situation improves. Relying on a for-profit company for basic communication means that something that should be a public utility has been privatized for profits.
HI EVERYONE ON BOREDPANDA I HAVE AUTISM AND ADHD AND LIVE IN PAERATA PUKEKOHE AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND I USE WHATSAPP A LOT SO WHEN IT WAS DOWN I THOGHT THAT IT WAS MY INTERNET CONNECTION BECAUSE ME AND MY FAMILY LIVE IN A RURAL AREA SO I TURNED IT OFF AND ON A FEW TIMES THEN UNISTALLED IT AND REINSTALLED IT TRYED TO LOG IN DIDN'T WORK SO I HAD TO EMAIL MY DAD ON OUTLOOK BECAUSE MY DAD HASN'T TOPPED UP MY CREDIT YET SO EMAILING WAS IT
.....I need to socialize more, this is the first I've heard of it....on the site I go to for pet photos.
Hope you've seen Squid Games to catch the jokes. If not... watch. It is addicting and bingeable in a weekend. Lol
My work phone also wouldn't connect to the internet at all during this time, it's a Sony phone and it all seemed a bit strange.
I didn't notice they were down. That's because I'm not on any of them and I actually manage to live a full and happy life.
This is the crap you get when one douchbag is able to vertically integrate platforms.
Well, facebook! You did get the phone calls about your extended warranty!
I was using Discord instead at that time, missing WhatsApp wasn't bothering my work therefore, and the other two, i don't have.
I legit upgraded my phone this morning before I realized it was down. Then my conspiracy mind took over and was like what's really going on in the world that "they" didn't want the news to travel about? hmmm.....
They need to include Squid Game in title. Excellent references. Lol