Yesterday, a total global crash of the world’s most popular social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram sent shockwaves across the world.
The platforms, which regularly run 24/7 at full speed across the world, came to a screeching halt at around 8:30 a.m.
Users then took to Twitter to confirm it wasn’t just their accounts that were affected.
I wonder what instagram photographers doing rn
— drue. 📸 (@DruePhoto) October 4, 2021
did someone spill coffee on the keyboard or
— Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks) October 4, 2021
Moment of silence for reel creators who couldn't dance to one more Doja Cat song today. #instagramdown
— Boomelo (@Boomelo3) October 4, 2021
For nearly 6 hours, 3.5 billion users across the world were unable to access their favourite social media platforms and were forced to socialize in person and maybe even go outside.
Facebook attributed the crash to an error in the reconfiguration of routers, which took the site (as well as its other platforms) offline.
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) October 4, 2021
As a result, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is said to have lost approximately 9 billion dollars. However, his net worth is approximately 122 billion dollars.
Facebook stock also dropped nearly 5% by the end of the day.
By 4 p.m. PST, the social media platforms were restored and with them, peace.
To allow us to understand how much of an impact the six-hour break had, Berlin-based marketing agency ABCD Agency released some data.
During the six-hour outage:
- 25 billion WhatsApp messages and 54 million Facebook messages were not sent
- 3.75 billion fewer minutes were called via WhatsApp
- 125 million Instagram stories were not posted
- 53 million photos were not uploaded to Facebook
- 3.6 billion minutes used for something else that would otherwise have been spent on Instagram
How did you use your time during the great #FacebookDOWN event of 2021?
