News

25-Minute Facebook Outage Causes Mass Panic

by Nuzha Nuseibeh
Sean Gallup/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Lots of big things are happening in the world at this very moment: A new King was crowned in Spain; American Apparel's CEO was voted out of the very company he founded; the ISIS crisis in Iraq continues; thousands of lives are still being lost in Syria. Still, dominating the news Thursday morning was Facebook going down for roughly 25 minutes. Because who cares about those refugees when I can't check my friggin wall, dude!? Who messaged me? WHO!?The news of the half-hour of a Facebook-free world hit the world like a brick in the face early Thursday morning. "Facebook Down: Brief Outage Shuts Out Millions of Users," NBC News wrote. "Facebook Goes Down In Worldwide Outage," read Forbes. "The Unthinkable Has Happened: Facebook is Down, Reasons Unknown," Firstpost wrote desperately. And then, just twenty minutes later, the relieved and reassuring headline from the Wall Street Journal: "Facebook Service Returns After Apparently Widespread Outage." Across the world, users who tried to log into their Facebook page — only to receive a standard "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can" message — turned to their trusted news sources to assuage their growing panic (is it just my Facebook? Did Zuckerberg read that insensitive comment I made about him last week? I was kidding, Mark!). We weren't alone, we realized: everyone had been hit. And then, users began to wonder: why us? And why now? Answers were still hard to find. Said USA Today: "Attempts by USA TODAY to reach the Menlo Park, Calif.,-based social networking company for a fuller explanation of the disruptions were not immediately successful."

Though full functionality has now been restored, the reasons for the social media giant's brief absence remain a mystery. Thankfully, some of the morning's panic was stemmed by Facebook's arch-enemy Twitter — almost immediately, the hashtag #WhenFacebookWasDown began to trend, with users using social media to joke about how little they need social media.

Well, you know you have it good when your greatest concern in the morning is that your virtual webpage where very little actually happens has a brief spell of technical failure.

Image: Sean Gallup/Getty Images