On Friday evening, a large number of social media users around the world appeared to be simultaneously connected to either their phones or Wi-Fi, as if the cause of the unrest spread around the world like a collective activity. That’s when the majority turned to the social networking site Twitter.
The problem was not the phone or the internet connection, but the three major social networking platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Facebook said in a statement on its Twitter account: “We know some people are having trouble sending messages, photos, videos, and other files to our apps. We apologize for the inconvenience and try to get things back on track as soon as possible. ‘
Although services have been restored, the cause has not yet been determined.
Following Facebook’s acknowledgment of the technical glitch, many users made some interesting comments, acknowledging their frustration and confusion.
One of them, Suresh Pilania, said, “I have restarted my phone a hundred times in the last five minutes and I did not know that WhatsApp and Instagram had actually crashed.”
Although WhatsApp has now been restored and many users have expressed their satisfaction on social media, the official WhatsApp account thanked users and said, ‘Thank you for your patience, it was 45 minutes long but Now we are back.
Social media addiction and the constant use of these apps by people is being measured by the fact that not only users turned to other apps to detect the closure of these apps, but were also seen expressing resentment over the disruption in their communications.
This search and frustration were seen in the form of interesting memes on Twitter. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Mark Zuckerberg started trending.
“WhatsApp, Insta, Facebook users Mark Zuckerberg” spoiled the whole mood, “wrote Ian Khan, a user on the communication breakdown.
Me coming to twitter to see if it’s just my whatsapp & instagram not working #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/RE5U4n5ZuC
— G (@WSCREAMFOOTBALL) March 19, 2021
It is not uncommon for apps to be shut down on such a large scale and for such a long time, and the people to experience the disruption this has also happened in past. Last year in December the entire system and apps run by Google also stopped working for a few minutes.
Google users experienced a brief service outage which prevented them from using google applications like Google Docs, Youtube, and email.
Those who were extremely dependent on Google mobile and desktop applications greatly suffered from the outage.
For a brief moment, people thought it was their Wifi and felt so bad after they came to know what really happened.
Many users were seen expressing their current status through memes.
One user said: “WhatsApp Facebook Instagram has been shut down for 50 minutes, the subject will be discussed for 24 hours and Mark Zuckerberg will receive ridicule for the rest of his life.”
In the same chaos, there are many social media users who did not even know about this whole issue and they came to know about it through trending names.
Referring to those who were oblivious of these networking sites outage, a user named Tayyab Shah said, “The real legends are those who did not know about the issue of WhatsApp and Insta and they are trying to restart the phone.”
At a time when all three popular social platforms were closed, user activity on the social networking site Twitter skyrocketed.
The use of Twitter by Facebook and WhatsApp users seems to have become an interesting topic for meme creators.
A similar meme was shared with a user named Iffrah in which people were seen celebrating and it was written along with it that “the server of WhatsApp and Insta has gone down. And in the meanwhile, the Twitter head correspondent’s scene.”
“Everyone is heading to Twitter, while Mark Zuckerberg has shut down Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp servers,” wrote a Twitter user with a picture of a train full of people inside and outside.
Another user named Chris tweeted a meme showing three penguins circling with the names of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp written on them, while a penguin, with Twitter written on it, clearly shown as the police officer who is interrogating all three other apps.
Although these social networking apps have been revived, their names and Mark Zuckerberg are still trending and now people are returning to the same apps with tweets and memes circulating.