Social media chaos erupted when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went down on Monday.
The three platforms, which are owned by Facebook, began experiencing outages in the middle of the day. Facebook had to use Twitter to address the problem publicly.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” the company said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
According to CNN, the outage is a Domain Name System (DNS) failure. While social media users are unable to use Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, the company’s employees have been even more hamstrung.
Facebook’s internal systems stopped working, including the company’s internal communications platform. The New York Times reported some employees couldn’t even get into buildings and conference rooms because their digital badges weren’t functioning. Engineers were also struggling to even assess the issues as they were unable to access server areas.
The outage came on the heels of a Facebook whistleblower revealing her identity in an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, recently leaked thousands of pages of internal research and documents that increased scrutiny of the company.
Haugen accused Facebook of hiding its myriad of issues from investors. She said the company prioritized profits over any efforts to stop misinformation and hate speech as well as Instagram-facilitated harm to children and teens.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatApp going down prompted lots of chatter from rappers and other Hip Hop figures on Twitter. Some delighted in the social media platforms being rendered useless while others wondered if something sinister was at play. Quite a few turned the whole situation into an opportunity for jokes.
Check out some of the notable reactions from the Hip Hop community below.
Man done beat the feds & cancer u thought IG was gone defeat bruh. 🌚
this is actually quite historic & i’m living!
