Millions of people are turning to Twitter after Facebook and its Instagram, Whatsapp platforms went down for hours on Monday.
The six-hour global outage of social media platforms operated by Facebook on Monday led to a massive migration to Twitter, where a flood of jokes and memes reacted to the news.
Twitter welcomed the online crowd that moved to its platform after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for hours without an official explanation.
The official Twitter account tweeted “Hello literally everyone”, eliciting responses from not only WhatsApp and Instagram accounts, but others as well.
Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were back online later Monday, and said the “root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there was “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage.
The company apologized and said it was working to learn more about the cause.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: We are sorry,” Facebook said.
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to announce that they’re back online now.”
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com said it had received 10.6 million problem reports ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with the problems first appearing around 3:45 p.m. GMT.
On Tuesday morning, WhatsApp chief William Cathcart also took to Twitter to say the service was “up and running again”, but didn’t elaborate on what might have caused the issues.
Ian Sherr, CNET’s editor, told Al Jazeera earlier that, judging from initial reports and error messages received by users on Monday, it was very likely that something was “configured in a way incorrect”.
I don’t know who to give my data to with Facebook down. I just yelled my PIN at an old man.
— James Felton (@JimMFelton) October 4, 2021
twitter really be like pic.twitter.com/2Ru8lGEre0
— ً (@4ieed) October 5, 2021
For hours, Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and said it was working to restore access.
As for internal failures, Instagram manager Adam Mosseri tweeted that it looked like a “snow day”.
hello literally everyone pic.twitter.com/yvRVYMdNUe
— 💛النصر🇸🇦🇸🇦العالمي💛 (@art_nfc) October 5, 2021
Mark Zuckerberg has concluded his research on the rating of every woman on Earth and has now shut down Facebook. Thank you all for your cooperation.
— John Carpenter’s Ben Schwartz (@benschwartz_) October 4, 2021
The Twitter memes kept coming.
As an unverified screenshot circulated suggesting facebook.com was for sale, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “How much?”
Streaming giant Netflix also joined in the fun by posting a meme from its hugely popular show Squid Game.
When Instagram and Facebook are down. pic.twitter.com/mVFlVOOCOC
—Netflix (@netflix) October 4, 2021