This is incredible, these tools have become so important for communication, so people around the world are flummoxed.
Because everyone thought it's their own phone that's gone wrong because no matter where they turn they can't connect whether it's Facebook whether it's WhatsApp or Facebook or messenger or Instagram and even the high tech early adopter types who use virtual reality if they are on Oculus VR which is owned by Facebook they've also gone down.
So anything owned by Facebook right now is down. People asking what's wrong etc and of course, Facebook is silent in all of this.
So you are looking at Twitter presumably to see the complaints or outlets like that where people can talk about what's happening with Facebook there's actually a sector which tells you if a particular site is down so if you can't reach the site you go to the down detector and you type it in and down detector will tell you if there are other complaints and almost instantaneously there were thousands of complaints from around the world.
For any of those services but particularly, in particular, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Instagram saw huge spiking complaints and that's why we can time it almost precisely.
Facebook might say they're aware of the problem and they are investigating and they let us know.
Once they know what the issue is and that is usually almost presented to the world, to their customers, and to the media as being an adequate explanation and of course, it isn't it's not telling people what went wrong or why it went wrong so we're still waiting for word from them we're still waiting for them to even tweet although I don't think they'll tweet that's going to be very embarrassing that twitter is up and all of their services are done presumably I mean they could do them the old-fashioned way and just speak to media outlets around the world who then report online would that be the best way.
You'd think but right now Facebook has a very fractious relationship with the media after last week's revelations in the wall street journal about how they had known about the effect of Instagram in particular on teenagers mental health and they had intending to launch a service for kids called Instagram for kids and after that the backlash they canceled the launch of Instagram for kids so right now they are running shy of the media so this couldn't have come to the worst time for them so this is potentially another potential huge nightmare for Facebook.
Do you think that people will be outraged I mean this is just staggering the scale of it or will we all just be relieved that we can get online again and forget about it?
No, the outrage is palpable especially if you look at comments on other social networks in particular Twitter and there has been a campaign for a while for people to quit Facebook and now it's picked up tremendous momentum as a result of this outage.
In these times of the covid-19 pandemic, people depend heavily on Facebook for family news for example yeah so it's across all of these platforms and it takes facebook months to install trust whenever they have even smaller outages than this one wow and I mean these points to the huge issue that there are so many benefits to the world being so interconnected.
But there have been warnings that mean something can go wrong and then we're all down at the same time.
Is the world about to find out what it's like to go back to the time of no social media?
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