As millions of users from across the world opened their phones for the occasional scroll this morning, they were met with that startling, dreaded message: “Could not refresh feed.” Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp shut down their services due to an unknown outage. How will this affect USC students, businesses, and users from around the globe relying on these outlets for communication? Shreya Ranganath has more on this story.
Facebook Inc., which owns the massively popular social media giants Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, brought services offline this morning at 9, leaving millions frantically searching for an outlet of connection. Facebook took to Twitter first, releasing the following statement. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and apologize for any inconvenience.” Twitter used the opportunity at hand to poke some fun, tweeting: “Hello to literally everyone.”
We spoke with Nicolette Peji, a sophomore design student, about her experience logging on to Instagram and noticing the shutdown. This is her favorite app, due to it’s visual-centric display and fast access to information.
It’s easy when you meet new people on USC’s campus to get their Instagram. That’s how I have met most people so far since I’ve only been on campus a month. So if you’re kind of disconnected from that, you’re kind of disconnected from, like, most of the people you know, except for maybe your roommates. You don’t really get to see what’s going on on campus.
From a business perspective, users are also greatly impacted by a lack of platform or medium to display products, make sales, and draw the attention of massive audiences. USC Annenberg Professor and Social Media Expert Karen North says that a global outage of this magnitude has a massive impact.
It’s a communication tool that is central to a lot of businesses. So for groups and support groups, for a variety of people who interact in a meaningful and important and even financially necessary way, in terms of safety and health, when they go down, is a much harder blow than those who traditionally use social networks that will be hard to recover from.
Only when our social media apps go down, do we realize how deeply dependent on them we are.
Again, Karen North.
When these things go down, it’s not merely a social network, it’s not merely that you can’t share your vacation photos, it is really a huge interference with the daily lives and operations of people both personally and professionally.
At airtime of this show, Facebook owned services are still offline, and the different platforms are left to plead for patience from their users while they scramble to solve the problem. Until then, users around the world will continue to log on, refresh, and wait.
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UPDATE: At the time of the show’s airtime, Facebook was online for some users.