And millions of teens around the world make eye contact with their parents for the first time.
Just a day after Google started acting wonky, Facebook and Instagram are at it too. It’s one thing if Google brings an entire office to a standstill— I mean pfft, it’s ONLY work right but God forbid if the millions of millennials can’t flex on the gram or share a post on Facebook, it’s effectively the end of the world.
Jokes aside, the social media platforms appear to only be partially down. As of right now, the outage doesn’t affect everyone, just some unlucky users. What exactly is going on is yet to be disclosed. All we know for now is that those affected by it can still open the platforms, they just can’t send or receive messages, nor post new content. I know first hand what it’s like to be one of those affected. My feed on Instagram was acting up so, being the genius I am, I logged out thinking it would work once I logged back in but now I can’t even access my account!! How will I keep up with the the hottest gossip now?!!! Why did I even think that would work!? So many questions.
Facebook has responded to the outages via twitter:
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Facebook (@Facebook) March 13, 2019
According to Downdetector, the outages appear to mostly be in North America, parts of South America, The UK, India and the Philippines. This is rather worrying, to be honest. It comes just a day after Google experienced similar issues with their ecosystem. For now, the only Facebook owned app that’s working normally is Whatsapp. If that starts acting weird then at least we have a reason for the blue ticks eh.
On a more serious note, It also begs the question— are we too reliant on companies like Google and Facebook in our daily lives? It’s something worth pondering on, especially now that we literally have nothing better to do with our spare time.
We’ll keep you posted should there be any updates.
Update: Facebook has since issued a statement via Twitter.
Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) March 14, 2019
So it turns out that the whole hullabaloo was the result of a “server configuration change”. Why didn’t they warn us about it prior though? In the current landscape, when Facebook or Instagram crash, small businesses and even big brands can suffer. The conspiracy theorist in me is screaming that there’s more to this. For now however, I suppose i’ll have to settle for Facebook’s official stance.
