We’ve heard this story before: a social media outlet is experience an outage and users go to another social network and express their frustrations instead of perhaps doing something else.
Shortly after midnight Tuesday, both Facebook and Instagram went down, which meant users could not post selfies, publish updates about what food they’re eating and connect with a stranger.
Upon entering both websites, visitors were informed that “something went wrong,” while others reported an unloading page. The outage affected a major portion of the United States, while users in Asia, Australia and New Zealand also had difficulties logging in.
Tinder, a dating application that relies on Facebook to offer its service, was also down.
Despite many of the craziness that transpired on Twitter – the #facebookdown quickly became a popular trend on the microblogging website – the websites returned to normal about an hour later. It was reported that the outage was actually self-inflicted. According to Facebook, the downtime was due to a technical change.
“Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram,” Facebook said in a statement. “This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”
It was reported at first that Lizard Squad, an online group, was the culprit behind this attack because it claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages.
Apparently, this was the longest loss of service since Facebook’s famous Sept. 24, 2010 outage, which didn’t allow any access for more than two hours.
BBC News reports that media analyst Arthur Goldstuck wrote to everyone: “I hope you all took advantage of the 35 second Facebook outage to Like a person in real life. #Faceboogeddon.”
Facebook currently maintains approximately 1.35 billion users, while Instagram has more than 300 million users.
Here are some of the Twitter antics:
#FacebookDown last night and people were like… pic.twitter.com/iyQsmHCQLf
— Pagemodo (@Pagemodo) January 27, 2015
'10 Extremely Amusing Tweets During The #FacebookDown Crisis of 2015’ (Via @Twittistaan) http://t.co/dozL3jBG4l pic.twitter.com/dZZf8IS0x2
— Simon te Brinke (@gramercypark) January 27, 2015
Things to do when Facebook is down: 1. Tweet that Facebook is down. #facebookdown
— Jonathan Gebauer (@jogebauer) January 27, 2015
