Monday, October 4th could have felt like a snow day or day off for many people. Not because of weather or work, but because of a day free of social media. This day was not planned, definitely not for Mark Zuckerberg, who lost seven billion dollars from his net worth. This was a day that Facebook and Instagram crashed for a few hours. This was one of the longest outages in history, causing confusion and anger. 

Users started reporting errors around 11:40am ET, and within minutes, Facebook had completely disappeared from the internet. This outage lasted over 5 hours, affecting over 3.5 billion users. The last outage that Facebook experienced was in 2019, but it did not last for half the time. 

If one thing is certain, we now know how much we depend on these apps and social media as a whole.  Many people were reaching out via twitter with how they felt about the outage. For example, rapper “OFFSET” tweeted out “D*mn, I just noticed I’m addicted to Instagram.” He was just one of the few that may have been too dependent on the apps. 

Another affected user was my mother, Sharon Parker. As someone that is not on their phone a lot, this didn’t affect her as much. She went about her day and just assumed that “there was a problem with the app.” She states that, “My phone has been having issues, so I just assumed that was the problem until I received news about the shutdown.” Parker was one of the few people that were not affected as much, due to the lack of interaction on social media. 

Personally, I thought it was similar. As an Instagram user, I experienced many delays. As I opened the app there was a message reading “Cannot refresh feed.” This led me to think that my Wi-Fi or cellular data was down. I then reset my home Wi-Fi and shut my phone down multiple times. I was extremely confused until I started using other apps. I continued to use apps such as Tik Tok and Safari, so I then realized this problem was specific to Instagram and Facebook, and that I should just take a break from these apps until they are back.  

Since the outage,  Facebook and Instagram have returned back to normal with the company apologizing. The apps are functioning as normal, and the company hopes to prevent all outages in the near future.