A world without Facebook and Instagram is a world nobody wants to live in. On Saturday morning, the globe descended into chaos as both of the social media sites went down. Panicked social media mavens logged on to Twitter, frantic about the devastation unfolding across computer screens. By the afternoon, the issues largely appeared to subside. Millennials will not soon forget the weekend morning when social media crashed, though.
Facebook flutters away
For many users, Facebook entered a period of total shutdown on Saturday. Some people simply couldn't log in, while others couldn't get the website to load at all.
Either way, people weren't able to access the site in any concrete or meaningful way. That was true on both desktops and on the mobile app. This was also a global phenomenon, affecting nearly every corner of the world, with messages popping up saying that the website would be back up in a short period of time.
The outage appeared to last for about 75 minutes or so, not insignificant in the middle of the day for a major website. Normal functionality has returned, although some slow download speeds are still impacting users. At the peak, thousands of outages were reported. Facebook can take solace in the fact they weren't alone on Saturday - Instagram was facing its own technical difficulties.
Instagram isn't immune
At around the same down, Facebook was experiencing its issues, Instagram was right there beside them. Error messages were being posted in online forums, showing users struggling to gain access to their account. People couldn't post or share pictures/videos, rendering accounts useless. Some people also reported seeing unusual and alarming alerts when they tried to perform activities and functions on the app.
Instagram appeared to be down for about the same time parameters as Facebook, with the website back up and running by the time the afternoon arrived on the east coast. Users are now free to post pictures of sunny skies and videos of outdoor food festivals. A world without all those things would not be a world worth living in.
It's worth noting that many people posted their complaints about Facebook and Instagram on Twitter. When two social media outlets failed, another one rose from the ashes. There can no longer be any doubt about which social media platform is the king of its castle - until the seemingly inevitable next set of outages, that is.
