Every now and then, someone over at Meta HQ trips on a big wire and the whole internet starts to glitch out. Feeds don't update. There are no more threads to read, sunset photos to double tap. "Something went wrong," Instagram declares.
Or did it? I cry out, chucking my phone across the room and running barefoot into the woods. Maybe something has finally gone right. Nature is healing!
Of course, in reality, when Facebook, Threads and Instagram went haywire on Tuesday, I didn't actually throw my phone — it's a work device, after all — and I didn't quite "run into the woods" so much as I scrolled over to Bluesky (the woods of social media) to hang with other extremely online Millennials delighting in the chaos across town.
ICYMI: Hundreds of thousands of people were cut off from the dopamine drip known as Meta's social platforms early Tuesday, for reasons that weren't immediately clear, my colleague Clare Duffy writes.
Meta's status page showed "major disruptions" impacting some areas of the platform. More than 500,000 people reported having a problem with Facebook on Downdetector, which tracks website outages.
By early afternoon East Coast time, things seemed largely back to normal and everyone was, thank God, able to post their power lunch pics and crack jokes about how cleansed they feel after two full hours without Instagram.
These kinds of widespread outages are rare. But when they do occur, it's usually the result of something fairly benign, like a bug in a software update.
Why does it matter?
If you've ever wondered what makes Meta a $1 trillion-plus company, Tuesday's hiccup should help explain.
Meta is ultimately an advertising company, so its algorithms are designed to do one thing really, really well, and that's keep as many eyes on the platforms as possible, for as long as possible. The more we scroll, the more ads Meta gets to serve us. And, crucially, the more we scroll the better its algorithms learn which kind of ads we'll engage with and which ones we'll scroll right by.
For a bunch of complex psychological reasons, we humans really enjoy the scroll. And when we were suddenly, unexpectedly untethered from it Tuesday, there was a sense of both relief and horror. Relief at knowing there's nothing new to see in our feeds. Horror at realizing how reflexively we gravitate to those apps the moment a craving for stimulus kicks in.
All of that introspection evaporated the minute the Gram came back online, naturally. Where were we? Ah yes, dog videos. Vacation selfies. Ads. Wedding photos. Ads. Ads. Ads.
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