• What's Trending
  • Posts
  • The Conspiracy Theories and Why Facebook Shut Down This Week

The Conspiracy Theories and Why Facebook Shut Down This Week

October 05, 2021

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are all a huge part of the way we communicate. So when a social media outage shut them down yesterday morning, all hell broke loose.

The Facebook-owned apps stopped working around 11:30 a.m. and partially returned their functionality around 5:40 p.m. This outage made for one of the longest outages in the company’s history.

Why Did All of Your Favorite Apps Shut Down?

According to Facebook, the disruption was due to a “faulty configuration change.” The company said no user data had been compromised in the blackout, but Zuckerburg took his own blow with the outage.

Worldwide, 2.76 billion people on average used at least one Facebook product each day this June, according to the company’s statistics. WhatsApp is used to send more than 100 billion messages a day and has been downloaded nearly six billion times since 2014 when Facebook bought it.

The blackout sent Facebook shares down 4.8% and took away billions from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune. Zuckerberg’s fortune declined by $5.9 billion to a mere $117 billion in total.

Some ~Not So~ Crazy Conspiracy Theories:

Facebook seems to be having a bad time all around with not only its outages but also its political pushback. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” aired a segment in which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence, and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence. Facebook has pushed back on those claims, though Haugen released thousands of pages of internal documents to regulators and the Wall Street Journal. Because of this, Haugen is now set to testify before the Senate subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.

And just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline. This has raised some interesting questions about whether the outages and the whistleblower accusations are connected. Could it be Facebook’s attempt at a change of conversation or just purely coincidental?

Six Hilarious Hours Of  Twitter:

So your next question might be: what did everyone do when some of the most popular apps in the world shut down for six-hour? The answer: Make memes about it on Twitter and TikTok, of course.

Many users ran to Twitter to post their opinions about the blackout of their many apps. A few users even cracked jokes about how they wished Canvas or Gmail could have crashed instead so they really didn’t have to do work.

hello literally everyone

— X (@X) October 4, 2021

Overall, the internet had a good laugh about the whole thing, despite how serious the situation truly was. The Facebook outage on Monday was a great demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life. This proved that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger and critical platforms that are so much more than just a way to chat and share photos. We weren’t able to take international messages, reach out to anyone through social media, politicians weren’t able to connect to their audiences, brands to their consumers, and friends to their followers. Good thing we still have Twitter and TikTok or else yesterday could have been a whole different story.