In a shocking turn of events, it turns out the world continues to spin without social media. More often than not, when platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X experience outages, it is a blessing in disguise.
Users, desperate for answers, will flock to the nearest available online community to find out what has happened, as, without fail, the reaction memes start pouring out. If the issue is with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, then the likeliest places to find these bits of hilarity and chaos will be X and Reddit.
What happened to Facebook?
The latest panic came when Meta networks Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Threads stopped working on March 5. Users were logged out of their accounts and received an error message while trying to sign back in. Titled “Facebook will be back soon,” the pop-up said that the social platform is “down for required maintenance” but would be available again in “a few minutes.” The outage was experienced across the globe.
Users began reporting the problem on Down Detector — a website that offers real-time updates on the status of various others — at around 10am EST. Thousands of reports have been made up to the time of writing. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told his followers on competitor social platform X that the company is “aware people are having trouble accessing [their] services,” and that they were looking into the situation.
Per The New York Times, Meta and other online services have to answer to a Wednesday deadline set by the European Union to comply with the new Digital Markets Act, which aims to open up spaces for smaller brands to compete with advertising giants in places like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Facebook is the biggest social media page in the world, with over 2 billion daily active users. Maybe they should take this time to unplug and try a new hobby!
