The Day Social Media Went Down

Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp Went Down – Then This Happened

There are times when social media platforms start presenting a few problems. Perhaps users can’t log into their accounts, comment on a post, and that sort of stuff. There are always people working hard to make sure that these problems are fixed in no time.

However, in this case, things weren’t like that. You see, on March 13th 2019, three major social media platforms went down – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

As a result, people from all over the world started complaining about the service. Although the problem didn’t affect the entire world, there were several countries that could not make use of these platforms for over 8 hours.

Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, USA, and some countries in Europe were affected by this mysterious problem. 

Memes

We all know the Internet pretty well to know that things like this will always have memes. Indeed, users from all over the world started mocking the situation and went to Twitter to post memes about Facebook’s, Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s services being down. 

Benefits For Other Companies

Incredibly, the outage of Facebook and Instagram’s services didn’t stop people from finding another source of entertainment. As a matter of fact, many users decided to spend some of their time watching porn while they waited for Facebook and Instagram to be back online. 

Pornhub reported having a huge spike in usage at the time that Facebook and Instagram were down. Somewhere around 80 million more users than normal were active. Moreover, the adult site also reported that people kept searching for the names of the social media platforms on the search bar. 

In fact, the site reported a 221% jump in searches for “Facebook,” and a 323% spike in searches for “Instagram.”

The Reason Behind The Sites Going Down

So, what was the reason behind the outage? Did Facebook make a statement regarding the subject? Well, believe it or not, they did. Initially, people were arguing that the reason behind these social media platforms going down was no other than a Do S attack (Denial of service attack).

Now, what exactly is a Do S attack? Well as Wikipedia would say, a Do S attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet.

Of course, these sort of speculations were bad for Facebook. Especially because it put deals with their investors at risk. So, the social media platform decided to make a statement on their official Twitter account the following day. And this is what they said: 

Now, if this were to be true, it would explain why only Facebook owned platforms were affected, and not others such as Twitter or LinkedIn.

What People Think

The opinions on the subject are divided. For example, on one hand,  we have the generation of people who see social media as useless. And on the other hand, we have the generation of people who see social media as an opportunity of reaching success. 

So, for people who find social media to be unimportant, the outage of the platforms’ service wasn’t a big deal. In fact, many argued that this was an opportunity for kids to reconnect with their parents and do things like going out to play in the park, play games etc. 

Now, people who see social media as a necessity saw things from a completely different perspective. In fact, when the services didn’t go back online after a couple of hours, they started to worry. Not because they wouldn’t be able to like a post from their best friend, but because of the limitations they would have to face to grow professionally without social media. In a nutshell, these people were worried during the outage of Facebook and Instagram’s service. 

Mostly, because they know how much they help users all over the world to reach their goals. 

Final Thoughts

We often listen to people referring to social media as a cancer to our society. Moreover, they blame sites such as Facebook and Instagram for making the young generation focus only on that and nothing more. 

However, the truth is that social media does both good and bad. There are of course benefits in using it, as there are also negative aspects. But, overall social media has changed the lives of literally millions of people in the world. 

As a matter of fact, thanks to social media, there are more and more entrepreneurs every day. We have the opportunity to grow our businesses and make our dreams come true. So, we are glad that all three platforms, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are back online. And hopefully, this won’t happen again for a long time.