For a few wonderful hours yesterday evening it was 2003 again. Notifications from WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram simply stopped. The apps and sites ground to a halt after a mystery outage and suddenly we didn’t have to keep checking out phones every thirty seconds, we chatted to friends, we made love and the world was good. Then we got the fear.

At some point Mark Zuckerberg would surely channel his Jesse-Eisenberg-at-the-hackathon and manage to code a way out, and we’d receive a deluge of work related WhatsApp notifications, from the family WhatsApp, from groups you’d forgotten you’re even part of. It was only a matter of time. So we waited. And we meme’d.

And then, magically, this morning everything was tickerty-boo. Who knows what happened, we probably never will find out if China was perusing your drunken texts to your ex, your private-Insta posts or checking up on your Facebook statuses from 2008. But we are left with plenty of fantastic memes, which almost makes it all worthwhile.

Who knows what happened, we probably never will find out if China was perusing your drunken texts to your ex…

Unless, of course, you rely on Instagram for your work (think of the influencers), you were trying to arrange a meet-up via WhatsApp group or your only way to keep in touch with people is via messenger or similar.

https://twitter.com/arararararal/status/1445109519126867970

https://twitter.com/ChammoutHassan/status/1445085596108656646

With the big boys out of action it was time for Twitter’s 280 characters to come into their own. Lagging in recent years, the social network was awash with everyone who normally hangs out ‘Gramming their food, desperately looking for news (it was scant).

The social network was awash with everyone who normally hangs out ‘Gramming their food…

According to website DownDetector, dedicated to tracking online outages, there were 80,000 reports for WhatsApp, 30,000 from Instagramers and more than 50,000 from Facebookers, suggesting that the outage was global and massive.

https://twitter.com/PinkRangerLB/status/1445082165776105475

Shedding nearly no light on the matter, Facebook released a terse tweet explaining ‘We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

And *like that* the whole thing was over…

And, around 11pm, the WhatsApps started to flow, and the networks came back online and *like that* the whole thing was over.

Perhaps Edward Snowdon, responsible for one of the biggest leaks in CIA history and currently holed up in Russia, put it best when he Tweeted “Facebook and Instagram go mysteriously offline and, for one shining day, the world becomes a healthier place”.

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