We regret to inform you that Facebook is back
After a six-hour outage, in which peace on Earth was this close to being achieved, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more are returning to life
As much as it pains us to say it, Facebook is back. Despite sparing users crucial access to medical misinformation, 5G conspiracy theories, and just bad opinions about Batman movies for six whole hours, the world’s most popular social network/digital nation-state is returning to life.
Per The Verge, DNS routing problems were to blame for the outage, which shut down apps and social media sites that so many companies spent the last decade pivoting to. The blackout hit Instagram, Oculus, Facebook Messenger (now referred to as Messenger—drop Facebook, it’s cleaner), and Whatsapp. For many portions of the world, Facebook is the entire internet. Whatsapp, alone, provides text messaging services to more than 2 billion users. So it’s probably a good thing that Facebook bought all these companies. Keep them under one umbrella.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” said Facebook communications executive Andy Stone, taking the tone of a customer service representative that provides no real, usable information. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Other Facebook execs took to Twitter to express their remorse for the
outage. “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook
powered services right now,” wrote CTO Mike Schroepfer. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Apology accepted—on the condition that you cease trying to restore the site.
This was the longest Facebook outage since 2019, when the
site was down for more than 24 glorious hours. Moments of clarity such
as these are so fleeting. Once they’re over, how will we commemorate
them?
As we wait for someone over at Facebook to unplug their router and plug it back in, we should drink in these last precious moments without Facebook. Still, we should remember that there are untold casualties by the lack of Facebook. Imagine all the people forced to turn to YouTube for their information on horse dewormers. Lord knows where fans of Paul McCartney who want to yell at him for posting about Meatless Mondays will turn.