My parents remember where they were when most of New York lost power in 1977. I remember where I was when most of the North-Eastern United States lost power in 2003.
For many young people, Wednesday March 13th 2019 will be remembered as the day “IT” happened.
Facebook. Instagram. WhatsApp. Facebook Messenger. All either went down or experienced some sort of complications yesterday. (Somehow Twitter escaped unharmed however)
So what exactly happened yesterday that my 17-year-old neighbor described as “mass hysteria”? (I didn’t even realized still lived next door because I don’t think he has ventured outside since his Bar Mitzvah)
Was it a cyber-attack? Did Skynet become self-aware? Was it Thanos?
Did Tom from MySpace finally get his ultimate revenge on Facebook!?!
According to USA Today, it was nothing as sinister as any of these. It was simply an “accidental traffic jam issue with a European internet company that collided with Facebook and other websites,” according to Roland Dobbins, an engineer with network performance firm Netscout.
“While not malicious in nature, such events can prove disruptive on a widespread basis,” he said.
So just to be clear, they are saying the outage was NOT caused by anything sinister, such as a cyber-attack. Just a hiccup in the system that for some reason is taking longer to fix than normal.
Rob Leathern, Facebook director of product, tweeted early Wednesday afternoon that officials were “also aware that people are experiencing issues with access to our ads interfaces, we’ll share an update as soon as possible.”
Now if it was some sort of massive cyber-attack and not an innocent glitch, I doubt Facebook would let us know anyway. Part of being a publicly traded stock is protecting that stock (and share holders) from massive panic selling.
The outage appears to have been limited to Facebook products and not spread to other forums such as Fortnite. Otherwise, I would be more concerned about chaotic rioting ending Western society as we currently know it.
What are your thoughts on the Facebook outage? Do you think it was an innocent glitch or something more?
Geeky Daddy 
They certainly aren’t going to tell us it was something sinister unless they absolutely have to. I love that you blamed Tom from Myspace! lol You might be onto something there.
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Thanks. Thought I would turn the clock back a decade there and see how many people remembered “Tom”
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Definitely odd that it was only Facebook owned platforms that suffered a glitch. Even more so that a European internet company affected it in such a way! Someone clearly switched the off switch! 😉 Facebook would never declare what the true problem was anyway. Fortunately all seems to be ok now and let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. The only hysteria it caused in my house was the fact I could have the night off from work! 🙂 Sim
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I mean, I’m no techie, but I don’t think it was anything malicious. Especially for Instagram, there has been a lot of glitches this month. I hope some of that was solved yesterday when it was down!
-Madi | http://www.everydaywithmadirae.com
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Sometimes I like it, as it forces people to actually log off and look up. However, it’s always annoying when things don’t work. I wonder what Tom’s plans are! And definitely, I don’t think FB would ever tell us the real problem.
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I think gmail was down around the same time too. While I doubt it was anything malicious, these incidents definitely took me by surprise. Hope it doesn’t happen again!
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All I know is that I had a little day off from social media management! So Thanks to Tom and his colleagues…
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Ha ha good post..and I think its funny it went down..people are so glued to their phones..it was good to give the old eyes a rest..we wont die with out FB or any of the rest.!
Valerie
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I saw a tweet from the NZ police that they had random calls from people about FB and IG being down during that day. It’s hilarious how people rely so much upon FB and IG, it’s insane.
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