Facebook and Instagram Down: Twitter Wins the Day With Hilarious Reactions

Facebook and Instagram are still down, and the rest of social media's hilarious reactions are [...]

By Michael Hein

Facebook and Instagram are still down, and the rest of social media's hilarious reactions are almost worth the hassle.

Facebook and Instagram went down around 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, leaving many users in a panic. Of course, while the giant company is a major force in the industry, it is not the only social media game in town. On Twitter, for example, people flooded the platform with jokes about Facebook's problems.

"The date is March 14th 2019. 24hrs after #facebookdown," one person joked, with a depiction of a post-apocalyptic cityscape. "Nobody remembers how to reach loved ones or eat food without posting updates and the global economy has collapsed. The few Facebook users that migrated to twitter were among the lucky few to once again connect."

Many jokes centered around the great exodus to Twitter. Some Facebook users created new profiles on the network to keep abreast, while others logged into accounts that are generally dormant. Either way, Twitter buzzed with fresh activity.

Meanwhile, others mocked the overwhelming reaction to the outage. Facebook was not the only one getting complaints, as confused users called their internet service providers and even computer or smart phone manufacturers to ask why they could not log on.

"White moms complaining to their internet providers about Facebook not working thinking that their Internet isn't working because they needed to post another 'live laugh love' quote," one person joked.

One update even came from the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office in Virginia. They directed followers to Facebook's official statement — also delivered via Twitter — which described the issues as "required maintenance." In a later message, the site assured users that this was not the result of a DDoS attack.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook tweeted. "We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," it added.

DDoS stands for a distributed denial-of-service attack. It is often done using botnets or other systems to flood the bandwidth of a target system — such as a social media network — all at once.

The outage continues to inspire memes and outrage online, as at the time of this writing, the site has been down for five hours. The traffic monitoring site, Down Detector, notes that the issue is global.

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