Facebook Went Dark and it mislead many people, businessman and more

As he suspected his phone had been hijacked, an Atlanta businessman reset his passwords. When a Long Island woman who sells vintage items on Instagram was forced to cancel a sale event, she lost money. Freed from the distractions of social media, a graduate student in Texas sped through four tasks. The ripple effects of Facebook enormous outage echoed across the US and around the world for six hours on Monday. From Mumbai to Mexico City, billions of people were unexpectedly cut off from the internet as Facebook and its family of platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, ceased to load new information.

The repercussions were felt practically everywhere. Facebook alone has about 3 billion users, accounting for nearly a third of the global population. For many users, « Facebook is the internet, » as one web analyst told CNN. Notifications for photos and birthday reminders have been disabled. Businesses on the internet fizzled. Messaging ceased to exist. Thousands of people struggled to adjust. The following is a timeline of the outage. It was unclear what was going on when the applications went dark or stopped updating shortly before midday on the East Coast. Users who were perplexed refreshed their screens.

On social media, speculation increased. Is it possible that there was a data breach? Is this a huge hack? Is this a result of Mercury’s current retrograde? While some considered extraterrestrial hypotheses, others chose a more grounded approach. « I thought, ‘My phone has been hacked.’ I had to change all my passwords and update my iPhone software, » said businessman Tete Macharia. The suspense and conspiracy ideas grew with each passing minute. As a result, Macharia, who operates a freight and forwarding company in Atlanta’s suburbs, took extra precautions. According to Macharia, the outage also cut off the majority of his communication.

He uses WhatsApp to communicate with clients in other countries and was unable to contact them for several hours. The social media companies began to acknowledge the outage just after noon. WhatsApp, a popular messaging app outside of the United States, was the first to alert users at 12:16 p.m. ET, almost 35 minutes after the app stopped loading new content. Facebook acknowledged the outage six minutes later and apologised for any inconvenience. At 12:25 p.m., Instagram sent out a notification to its users. Twitter became the go-to place for social media users looking for updates. The jokes did as well. Meanwhile, memes began to flood in. Some took advantage of people’s early uncertainty, when they assumed the problem was with their phones or internet connection.