NEW YORK — For about an hour this morning, humans across the world were briefly forced to interact with each other in person. Shortly after 12:10 a.m. ET, Facebook and Instagram went down, leaving millions of users around the world briefly unable to post selfies or humblebrag. Visitors were greeted with a message that said, “Sorry, something went wrong.” For others, the page wouldn’t load.
A group identifying as the Lizard Squad, which hacked Malaysia Airlines’ website Monday morning, claimed responsibility for taking down the social networks on Twitter.
The outage affected a large portion of the United States, according to downdetector.com. Users across Asia, Australia and New Zealand also reported having trouble logging on.
“We’re aware that many people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram,” said Facebook spokeswoman Charlene Chian told CNN. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
But an hour is an eternity! Without Facebook, how are you supposed to know which friends are having birthdays? Without Instagram, are you supposed to just describe your dinner?
People quickly took to Twitter. And the outage quickly spawned a hashtag, #facebookdown. About 52 minutes later, both sites were up and running. And all was right with the world!
