Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Down: Outage Has Users Seeking Answers on Twitter

By Michael Hein

Social media spiraled into collective panic on Monday when Facebook and several of its subsidiary apps began to malfunction all at once. Starting around 11:40 a.m. ET, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were all down in huge swaths of the country. At the time of this writing, the company has still not commented publicly on what caused the outage.

The real-time service tracker Down Detector showed Facebook outages all over North America on Monday morning, particularly around large cities. The site relies on user-reported data, so it may not accurately represent the service interruptions everywhere, but the phenomenon caught plenty of attention on other social media apps. Within minutes, the hashtag "Instagram Down" was trending on Twitter.

As usual, the outage had some users feeling appreciative of Twitter, and thankful that there are some platforms not controlled by a single company. They also used Twitter to vent their frustration or share their snarkiest comments about the outage. Some said that if this kind of thing continued, they would turn more attention towards Twitter and use Facebook less.

Facebook interruptions continue in some parts of the world, and it is not clear what the cause is just yet. While we wait for them to be fixed, here is a look at the top tweets from the fiasco on Monday morning.

Support

Some tech savvy users wasted no time in reaching out to Facebook user support, with disappointing results. They reported slow and imprecise responses, if any came at all.

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Twitter Memes

Meanwhile, an increasingly familiar genre of memes resurfaced with jokes about users flooding Twitter just to discuss the other platforms. In many cases, outages like this can result in confusion on Twitter as infrequent visitors try to navigate the site.

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Lurking

In fact, many users admitted that they were not fond of Twitter but they were desperate for news on what was going on with Facebook. Some even joked about their own self-proclaimed addiction to social media in general.

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Take Notes

While Facebook outages are common enough to be familiar, Twitter has had far fewer meltdowns of this sort. For that reason, some users wondered why Facebook and its subsidiaries weren't taking more cues from Twitter.

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Extra Work

Some users complained that they had not realized the problem was with Facebook itself, and had done all kinds of unnecessary work trying to solve the problem on their own end. That ranged from resetting their home router to tinkering with their hardware itself.

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Frustration

Finally, the overwhelming majority of posts boiled down to simple frustration, and users demanding that the services they love be restored immediately. At the time of this writing, some Facebook connectivity issues persist.

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