Science & Tech
Greg Evans
Oct 05, 2021
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all caused worldwide pandemonium on Monday as the website experienced a major outage which put it out of action for six hours.
The problem was reportedly caused by a “faulty configuration change” on the Facebook routers which impacted all the platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
In a statement issued by Facebook, the tech giants explained: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter
All the technical jargon aside, the outage provided the rest of the internet a chance to mock Facebook, with many other major platforms and companies flocking to Twitter to join in on the jamboree.
Twitter themselves kicked things off by saying hello to “literally everyone.”
hello literally everyone— Twitter (@Twitter) 1633368467
Google, perhaps hoping that everyone would flock to them, asked if GMail was a viable alternative.
What do we do now? Gmail?— Google UK (@Google UK) 1633364620
Microsoft Teams joined in but not before unmuting themselves.
@Twitter *unmutes mic* Hey everyone.— Microsoft Teams (@Microsoft Teams) 1633375925
Zoom however had a few issues as they couldn’t get their shared screen to work as well as having their previous meeting run over.
@Twitter hi can everyone see my screen— Zoom (@Zoom) 1633386240
@TobyNwazor @Twitter our last meeting ran over sorry— Zoom (@Zoom) 1633387927
There were some friendly hellos by Reddit, Amazon, McDonald’s and Burger King.
@Twitter Hi.— Reddit (@Reddit) 1633369027
@Twitter I don't have hands so I'll just say Hi five times... Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi!— Alexa (@Alexa) 1633370729
@Twitter hi what can i get u— McDonald's (@McDonald's) 1633370191
Perhaps with nothing better to do WhatsApp and Instagram also said hello which also prompted a response from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
@Twitter Hi and happy Monday 😵💫— Instagram (@Instagram) 1633370081
@WhatsApp @obyezeks @Twitter thought this was supposed to be encrypted…— jack⚡️ (@jack⚡️) 1633369081
Netflix being Netflix couldn’t help but chime in with a meme from their new hit series Squid Game.
When Instagram & Facebook are down. https://t.co/mVFlVOOCOC— Netflix (@Netflix) 1633364402
We’d be very interested to see how many people logged on to OnlyFans during those six hours on Monday...
@Twitter Hey there 👋— OnlyFans (@OnlyFans) 1633371588
Tumblr? What are you doing here?
@Dreymwangi @Twitter https://t.co/8tH8E3a9BX— Tumblr🧣 (@Tumblr🧣) 1633371763
To be honest, this wouldn’t have happened during the halcyon days of MySpace and MSN Messenger (look it up, kids).
Top 100
The Conversation (0)