‘Hello literally everyone’: Twitter flooded after Facebook outage

The six-hour global outage of Facebook-operated social media platforms on Monday resulted in a mass migration to Twitter, where a flood of jokes and memes reacted to the news.

Twitter welcomed the online crowd that moved to its platform after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for hours without an official explanation.

The official Twitter account tweeted “Hello literally everyone”, prompting responses not only from the WhatsApp and Instagram’s accounts but also others.

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were back online later on Monday, and said “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage.

The company apologised and said it is working to understand more about the cause.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said.

“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now.”

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first appearing at about 15:45 GMT.

On Tuesday morning, WhatsApp head William Cathcart also took to Twitter to announce that the service was “back up and running” but did not elaborate on what might have caused the problems.

Ian Sherr, editor-at-large at CNET, told Al Jazeera earlier that, judging by early reporting and the error messages users received on Monday, it was most likely that something had been “configured incorrectly”.

Don’t know who to give my data to with Facebook down. Just shouted my PIN at a an old man.

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) October 4, 2021

twitter really be like pic.twitter.com/2Ru8lGEre0

— ً (@4ieed) October 5, 2021

For hours, Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and said it was working on restoring access.

Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day”.

hello literally everyone pic.twitter.com/yvRVYMdNUe

— 💛النصر🇸🇦🇸🇦العالمي💛 (@art_nfc) October 5, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg has concluded his research into rating every woman on Earth and has now shut down Facebook. Thank you all for your cooperation.

— john carpenter's ben schwartz (@benschwartz_) October 4, 2021

The memes on Twitter continued to roll in.

As an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “How much?”

Streaming giant Netflix also joined in the fun, posting a meme from its hugely popular show Squid Game.

When Instagram & Facebook are down. pic.twitter.com/mVFlVOOCOC

— Netflix (@netflix) October 4, 2021