It probably happened to you: people on WhatsApp groups saying – image/video not downloading; send again please or something to that effect. Or perhaps you checked your Wi-Fi and tried loading other sites to see if your network was the problem. The problem was elsewhere: WhatsApp was down and there were glitches on Facebook and Instagram as well. It has happened before, but that didn’t stop people from just losing it.
What did he say? What did she forward? Who fought with whom and why!! People had to delay gratification and we all know how much we hate that.
A lot of Instagram and Facebook users were refreshing their page, logging out and then logging in again… trying everything possible.
Nothing seemed to work.
Turning the Wi-Fi off and then on again...nothing! Those images and videos stubbornly refused to load/open.
It was a technical glitch and the respective social media platforms were trying to sort it out.
There were few or no complaints about Twitter misbehaving.
…Because Twitter was up and running.
….Had zero f**ks to give... because Twitter was unaffected by the social media storm raging elsewhere.
A lot of people who had Twitter accounts but never bothered to use them decided to give it a try… and spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Some netizens were very hot and bothered about the length of the outage; they felt that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram weren't doing anything to get their apps up and running again.
This happened.
Of course there were those who thought that there was a nefarious purpose behind it all: a rival wanting to scuttle WhatsApp and make people migrate to their service.
Facebook and Instagram put out tweets explaining the situation to users. The irony? Acute!
People who felt compelled to say/share instantly, migrated to Twitter or at any rate checked Twitter out to see if the problem was there as well.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing? Experts are of the view that we should all be spending more time in real rather than virtual/online interactions. We could all do with some weaning away from social media. So perhaps the temporary WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram outage was a blessing?
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