By now, we know that it took several hours for the systems to get back up and running, after which all Mark Zuckerberg could say was, “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Instagram and WhatsApp are also owned by Facebook, which means that they all use the same infrastructure and so they were affected too. Hell, even the messaging service they use to contact head of physical security to tell them to manually open the door was subsequently out of action. Employees couldn’t use their smartcard to unlock the front door to the building that contains the servers that control the system that sends the follow-up message. They couldn’t log into the system that would send the follow-up message. Not only that, but Facebook mistakenly prevented themselves from doing a whole list of other things too. So, as Hern pointed out, when Facebook’s servers were booted off the internet, it also booted off the ability to send that follow-up message and stop the crisis in its tracks. Here’s where Facebook really shot themselves in the foot though Facebook runs everything (and we mean everything) through Facebook. It would still take a while for things to get back up and running, but it would all be fixable so no damage done. Usually, this would be quite a routine thing to fix – Facebook would just have to send another update saying, “Oops, false alarm lol”. According to Alex Hern, the UK technology editor at The Guardian, Facebook (accidentally?) sent an update to a deep-level routing protocol on the internet that basically said they had no more servers.įacebook (accidentally, we assume) sent an update to a deep-level routing protocol on the internet that said, basically, 'hey we don't have any servers any more xoxo' This handy tweet thread does a pretty good job of summing it up.

So, here’s the digital apocalypse CliffNotes Below you’ll find a roundup of some of our favourite digital apocalypse tweets and memes – but before we get to those, it would probably be wise to explain what exactly happened. Maybe some of you actually were productive during the global outage, I was not though and Twitter had more than enough content to keep me entertained in lieu of its three sister platforms.

Whatsapp down memes 2021