You’ve just sat down after a long day of work, you pull out your smartphone to have a quick scan through your usual social media apps before returning to the real world, only to find THEY ARE ALL DOWN! The shock. The horror. It can’t be. You brush it off, thinking those clever wizards at Facebook will have it all back to normal by the time the kettle is boiled. Except this time, it isn’t. The three major apps, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all owned by Facebook, completely stopped working shortly after 5pm, and users were faced with error pages and unresponsive feeds.
So what do the majority of people do when their favourite apps are down? They go to Twitter, of course. The app saw monumental usage figures while Facebook and Instagram were down, with many users and businesses taking advantage of the situation to create some priceless memes – here are some of our favourites!
Naturally, social media users turned to the one platform that was still functioning – and companies wanted in on the action.
“hello literally everyone”, the official Twitter account tweeted, which prompted McDonald’s, WhatsApp, Instagram, OnlyFans and Reddit to join the conversation and make light of the social media meltdown.
Now this is one we can get behind! For anyone growing up between 1999 and 2005, you’d instantly recognise this chat layout. The slick emojis, the pixelated profile photos, and don’t forget the sheer terror when someone dared to nudge you. With everybody’s favourite messaging service WhatsApp down as well, MSN could have had one heck of a reunion party!
An oldie, but most certainly a goldie. Many users were quick to dig through their meme archives and throw this one into the #FacebookDown mix on Twitter. A quick little history lesson on this famous image. The photograph was taken by Dave Roth way back in January 2005, during the local fire department’s live drill training. Since then, it’s been a staple in modern culture and one of the ‘go-to’ memes whenever something disastrous happens.
Netflix were lightning fast off the mark to get this one created and tweeted, helping to promote their already record-breaking series ‘Squid Game’. Usage figures on Twitter rocketed while the other apps were having technical difficulties, but many users also took the opportunity to catchup on films and TV, with streaming channels like All4 and iPlayer also reporting high volumes of viewership.
We finish on perhaps our favourite of all, a tweet from CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, who was naturally having a grand old time thanks to Facebook’s issues. He poked fun at an error that showed Facebook’s domain was for sale in the midst of the outages. It got us wondering, how much do you think that domain would be worth?
Elliot is our resident tech-lover and petrolhead, who is in charge of spreading AdFeeder to the masses! Having previously worked with brands such as Porsche and BMW, Elliot specialises in content creation and social media.
