Maybe Don’t Call The Cops About Facebook And Instagram Being Down
Users are shifting over to Twitter (and calling the cops), to express their outrage over the outages.
Facebook and Instagram are down, forcing us bleary-eyed technophiles out into the world, where we are forced to make conversations with family members and friends and trudge our underwhelming days through the horrible, distinctly boring meatspace of reality.
Shit sucks, basically. Shit sucks so much that some desperate Facebook and Instagram users are calling the cops, urging them to do something about this global outage.
Emergency services are asking the public to stop calling triple zero about the Facebook and Instagram outage 😐 pic.twitter.com/ZHlGr1uQAt
— Sunrise (@sunriseon7) March 13, 2019
“Facebook and Instagram are reportedly experiencing mass outages this morning,” begins a Sunrise report on the cop calls, delivered with all the quiet resignation of a mum asking their child for the hundredth time to stop singing ‘Baby Shark’. “Queensland police are saying please don’t call Triple 0.”
Funnelled away from the emergency services, many have instead taken to the last, beautiful connection to the online world — Twitter — to share memes, tales of survival in this briefly social media-deprived world, and to engage in that noblest of cyberspace activities: shitposting.
Facebook users coming to twitter to check why it’s not working #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/ltvKXcRttk
— ً (@hobishaengbok) March 13, 2019
Facebook: Down
Instagram: DownTwitter be coming to the rescue like: #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/dOuBoSY9dk
— M.L (@MLxwolf_) March 13, 2019
Facebook and Instagram users making there way to Twitter #FacebookDown #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/SMxIxpNHAj
— j o s s y 🖤🧸 (@Jossy29474226) March 13, 2019
twitter because instagram and facebook are down #FacebookDown #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/RBSNRrkjA6
— jazzy ☆ (@itsjazzzyyy) March 13, 2019
@instagram please contact me
— Lindsay Lohan (@lindsaylohan) March 13, 2019
instagram: *is down*
me, an individual who is addicted to instagram:#instagramdown pic.twitter.com/Br1QJeXC34— sofia 🦋 (@sofiiahv) March 13, 2019
To be fair to the cop callers and the meme-makers, some outlets are reporting that this is the longest outage in the history of Facebook and Instagram. In the past, outages tend to have been quickly resolved — this one has been going on for at least three hours. According to Dave Lee of the BBC, the last time Facebook experienced a crash like this was in 2008; and back then, Facebook didn’t have anything like the number of users that it did now.
Anyway, at least some of the hardest working self-promoters in the world — Tommy Wiseau and failed businessman Soulja Boy — are taking the outage in their stride, using it as an opportunity to spruik their wares.
Facebook is down !
Instagram is down !
Welcome to my twitter ! pic.twitter.com/Yjk4o9BVOH— Tommy Wiseau (@TommyWiseau) March 13, 2019
Facebook???? Instagram???? Atleast the Soulja App isn’t down 🤷🏾♂️
— Soulja Boy (@souljaboy) March 13, 2019
Of course, the outages could be an opportunity to really hone our sense of self away from the hyperbolic and addictive social circles that dominate the internet — to rediscover our capacity for empathy; to reshape what it means to tackle opposing views; to really engage with the notion that all human beings are perhaps at their core, deeply and distinctly alike.
Or we could just shitpost some more. That’s good too.