Image: Social media gone. Credit: The Banner.
Users of message app WhatsApp and social media favorites, Facebook and Instagram were pulling their hair out over the past six hours as all three sites and apps were experiencing problems.
While people could still open the apps, visit profiles etc, information was not being updated like usual and messages were not being delivered.
While here in Bali it was happening through the night, in some parts around the world it was happening right at prime time in the middle of the day.
Meanwhile, Twitter was the only app working and Facebook jumped on to tell the world nothing in particular about what the problem was, saying….
“We are working immediately to return everything back to normal and provide the latest information as soon as possible,” WhatsApp wrote on their official Twitter account.
Likewise Facebook got on Twitter, with MIcke Schroepfer, Director of Technology at Facebook, giving more info on the outage but not much.
“We encountered a networking issue and the team is working as quickly as possible to fix and get things back on track as soon as possible,” he wrote.
It is still unclear what the issue actually was as no real explanation has a yet been posted, however, there is speculation the outage has something to do with a Facebook whistleblower video released on Youtube yesterday. The video makes many claims on the negative effects on our society by these mostly uncontrolled platforms.
As one of the only apps left to make inane comments about anything and everything was now Twitter, people began blasting away on accounts that hadn’t been used since the turn of the last decade. Some people were even seen opening a book for the first time in years.
You would think Twitter stocks would have shot up on Nasdaq overnight to unseen and unimaginable heights, but actually that didn’t happen, they dropped almost 4%. Facebook dropped around 5%.
Social Media is now back fully operational this morning, for better or for worse.
