Remember life before Facebook?
Monday’s outage gave us a rare glimpse. Did you learn anything?
During Facebook’s massive outage Monday, I tried reloading the website about 143 times over a six-hour span. I may be exaggerating but this is how it felt. Shame on me.
The global social media goliath has become such a fixture in our lives that when it suffered an outage, it was treated as if we experienced a power outage in our home. You know, absent-mindedly turning on light switches when we enter a dark room. And then we shake our head at our stupidity.
How many times did you feel like this Monday? Were you repeatedly disappointed or annoyed? Did it affect your day at all? Along with millions of other users, I initially thought it was only my Facebook account. Uh-oh, what did I post last night that got flagged by community standards? Am I in Facebook Jail?
Again, it’s like losing power in your home and then looking out your front window to see neighbors also in the dark. It’s not just me, it’s us. This is such a shameful relief, right? It somehow felt reassuring that Facebook was down around the world.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook stated on (ahem) Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Inconvenience? You’d think some of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users lost the connection to their memories by the way they reacted.
“What happened to Facebook?!” my social media friends asked on other platforms.
“My Instagram is down!”
“Is your Facebook working?” My friends on LinkedIn and Twitter immediately began mocking Facebook’s mysterious misfortune.
“Let’s leave Facebook down for 6 months and conduct a little experiment to see if the world is nicer and mental health improves
while it is gone,” one Twitter user wrote.
“Facebook is down so I’m asking this here: Which livestock medication should I take for a sinus infection?” joked TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
“Jerry, send me photos of your dinner here instead,” a friend messaged me.
If the outage lasted into Monday night, I would have been tempted as a joke to call a few of my Facebook friends to verbally share my latest posts.
“Hi, is this Dennis? Hey, it’s Jerry Davich. We’ve never met, but do you have a couple of minutes to hear about what I had for lunch?
Oh, and also my rambling thoughts on abortion, religion and older couples who bicker? Hello? Hello?”
I knew Facebook users relied on that network for their daily news updates. Their newsfeed keeps them informed (or misinformed) on an hourly basis. Facebook is their daily newspaper, unfortunately for the newspaper industry. And Facebook is free, or so they think. The true price is so much costlier than a newspaper subscription, automatically withdrawn each day through privacy breaches, security concerns, and algorithm targeting.
On Monday afternoon I began realizing how many people depend on Facebook as their primary mode of communication or interaction with others. The site connects them with friends, family members, familiar strangers, and the rest of the world on an interactive level. It’s now interwoven into the fabric of their social existence.
“Facebook is the internet to them,” Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik, told CNN as the outage continued.
Facebook has become such a fundamental dimension in most of our lives that when the social network promised to “get things back to normal” its users got a six-hour peek at what life was like before Facebook hijacked so much of our time. And our life.
“Kind of a pleasant day, I must say,” Vicki L. commented on my Facebook page after it got restored.
“It was nice,” Pam G. added.
Other readers felt abandoned.
“I was sooooo lonely,” Ruth Ann J. admitted.
“I didn’t realize how much I rely on it for communication,” Matt V. said.
Other readers quickly pointed out the suspicious timing of Facebook’s “outage” — was it a massive reboot to remove incriminating evidence? — just one day after whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed her identity on
“60 Minutes.” The former Facebook product manager revealed how the company knew about the societal dangers of its newsfeed algorithms. (I touched on its time-sucking implications in my previous column.)
As Haugen testifies before Congress, we should testify about our obvious addiction to Facebook. Networking sites will do anything to keep us on them to entice more clicks, likes and comments. It’s all about profits for investors of a publicly traded company with an estimated worth of $1 trillion.
The wondrous, treacherous social network has become such a critical infrastructure in our lives that when it disappeared, for just a few hours, its absence punched a hole in our day. And in our normalcy. Even if that normalcy is littered with negative dynamics of the human condition.
Anger. Hate. Drama. Extremism. Misinformation. Polarizing content. Whatever it takes to keep our attention, Facebook has used it. We didn’t need a whistleblower to alert us. We just need to look at our newsfeeds. And our not-so-secretive habit dozens of times every day for the sake of entertainment and social interaction.
Let’s face it. Facebook is us.
It connects us. It divides us. It repels us. It attracts us. It uses us. And we know it.