This is why I have accounts on WordPress, Mastodon, and the X formerly known as Twitter. And trust newspapers on the “open web” and Google searches to find answers.
I’d fallen asleep to a replay of a Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco livestream concert from the night before, started it playing again on my phone at the breakfast table, then after a while got a never-before-seen Facebook message informing me that I had been logged out. It may have said something like “session expired,” at about 10:30 a.m., and since I normally don’t watch Facebook replays of livestreams, I wondered if that was the cause…
Grabbed the laptop to remind myself of my Facebook password, tried it and couldn’t log in on either the phone or the laptop. So, off to Twitter and Mastodon.
Discovered there are websites called https://downdetector.com and https://MetaStatus.com that keeps track of such things. Also pleasantly surprised to see that as early as 10:41 a.m. The Hartford Courant (“The nation’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication”), where I spent the 1970s, had a story by 11 a.m. When I got around to looking at it, The New York Times had a few more details.
On DownDetector, reports were coming in from New York to Nepal saying that Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger were unavailable.
At 11:11 a.m. I was relaxing in the assurance that the world is still spinning, that my phone had not been hacked (I received, and ignored, a “warning possible spam” call from an unidentified Virginia number just before 10:30) and that my WordPress account could still spread the word. Now I’m going out for a walk.
———————————— PAUSE ———————————-
Well, instead of going for a walk, I kept poking around Mastodon, saw a reference to someone not being able to log into YouTube, so went over there — where I had been working on a mandolin tutorial the previous day. It was fine, so I strummed along for an hour instead of going for that walk.
At 12:45 p.m., went to close some browser windows and saw that Mastodon had a post saying, “Why can’t Facebook ever stay down?” So I checked Facebook and Messenger, and they appear to be back. Now I’m really going out for that walk.
=================== — Update — =========================
More than a week later, I went back to see what Google could find about the cause of the March 5 Facebook outage. The first substantial article that came up in a search was this one at Forbes:
Facebook and Instagram Down – Here’s Why. The Forbes technology reporters also linked to a more technical site for further information, ThousandEyes.com, which I’ll be bookmarking for the next mysterious outage. Here’s the March 5 analysis: meta-outage-analysis-march-5-2024 and, if you want lots more information, you apparently can register for a March 12 “webinar” on coincidental March 5 meta-comcast-linkedin-outages.
mild-mannered reporter who found computers & the Web in grad school in the 1980s (Wesleyan) and '90s (UNC); taught journalism, media studies, Web production; retired to write, make music, photograph sunsets & walks in the woods.
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