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KOCHI: What would life be for us without Instagram reels to scroll through, Facebook posts to comment on or WhatsApp to message or video call our friends on? One word — unimaginable.  People across the globe got a taste of such a ‘disconnected’ world on Monday night, when data giant Facebook Inc went offline for around six hours, taking its undertakings Instagram and WhatsApp with it. 

The services were restored in India in the early hours of Tuesday. In the nmeantime, netizens started putting out hilarious memes and tweets about the downfall of the social media giant, which lost over $6 million, thanks to the fiasco. 

According to DownDetector, an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services, the problems started late Monday morning, when these social media apps started going down in many countries simultaneously. 

While many people initially thought their WiFi is malfunctioning, some others thought their accounts have been hacked!Others rushed to other platforms like Twitter, TikTok and SnapChat to post their memes and jokes on the issue. Humour is how the internet copes after all!

Meme worthy!

Ironically, Facebook itself took to Twitter to apologise to its users for the inconvenience caused. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” the tweet on Facebook’s official page read. 

Soon, Twitter was flooded with memes, some of them equating the scenario to the South Korean series Squid Game being aired on Netflix. The digital darkness was being picturised as the harbinger of ‘games to come, which is quite twisted, given the homicidal premise of the show. 

Other memes took a dig at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was shown entangled in a bunch of wires, doing IT support. The text said ‘Mark Zuckerberg right now’ or ‘Mark trying to fix WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook at the same time.’ Some users contemplated moving to less popular platforms LinkedIn. A meme said,  “When everything is down, you move over to LinkedIn”.  

On Tuesday, Facebook again took to Twitter to announce that the major outage was caused by configuration changes to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centres. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” it read. 

Clam of apps
Instagram and Whatsapp were independent apps. However, as a part of its expansion plan, Facebook decided to acquire both these companies. Instagram was acquired in 2009 whereas Whatsapp was acquired in 2014.

Around 9pm on Monday, platforms owned by Facebook Inc, including WhatsApp and Instagram went blank in many countries around the world. This was followed by confusion, and finally panic.

Though hilarious memes and tweets made up for the void, this temporary disruption makes us think: Can we live without the virtual world?