Yesterday, the ultimate social catastrophe occurred: WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook all crashed. The three apps, which are all owned by Facebook, went down just before 5pm on Monday, with social media users forced to turn to Twitter, Snapchat and the dreaded SMS to communicate with other people. Because of course we couldn't just, you know, call each other... or watch television... or sit in silence. At least, I couldn't.
What caused WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook to go down?
According to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down because of a 'faulty configuration change'.
'Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted communication,' read a statement on Facebook's engineering website. ''This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.'
In laymans terms, that basically means they had a networking issue. 'Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,' Mark Zuckerberg said in response.
Facebook are very typically vague about the causes of their crashes, according to the Independent. 'In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations"' they wrote.
How much money did Facebook lose?
One of the most Googled questions about the outage is not what caused it though, but how much money Facebook lost due to it's hours out of service. When the outage occurred, Facebook's shares immediately began to drop. Overall, the value of the company fell by 4.8%, meaning Mark Zuckerberg lost $5.9billion (£5billion), according to Forbes.
His total fortune is now $117billion (£99billion), so someone should probably check he can afford his lunch today.
Predictably, the best thing to come of the outage were the memes that came in thick and fast on Twitter...
The Best Memes Now That Whatsapp and Instagram Are Down
Click through for some hilarious comments by celebs on Instagram...
Just Some Of The Best Comments Celebs Have Left On Instagram
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