Facebook goes on the blink, world doesn't come to an end

Constantly clicking the refresh button for the updated feed on the Facebook account, you would have wondered if the world had come to a halt during those 30 unending minutes when Facebook experienced a global outage last weekend. 

‘World coming to a screeching halt’ sounds over-the-top, rather too imaginative and an exaggerated version of the account? Well if you feel so, what would you react to these: “FB users are roaming the streets in tears, shoving photos of themselves in people’s faces & screaming ‘DO YOU LIKE THIS? DO YOU?” by 9GAG and “#Facebook is down! Apocalypse now! The end is near” by a twitter handle, Stueel.

 Amidst the frenzy, twitterati and sundry other social media fraternity went berserk online, pronouncing the end of the world and many other dire portents, with a dash of sarcasm and wit to either show our overdependence on social media, or just for the heck of some good humour on an otherwise dull and hot day. 

“Sorry, something went wrong” read the message if you visited your FB account on that fateful June 19 afternoon. While half of the world, opened their eyes to this news, we in India were languidly passing our day, or may be, some of you were in the m ur long outage, it was the same level of enthusiasm and helplessness that echoed across other social media platforms.

But maybe the level of witticism and sarcasm is getting sharper from time to time.“No, we wouldn’t want another outage just for the heck of those one-liners. But those were fun,” admits Vinamra Bali who is enjoying his vacations at home after completing his engineering a month ago. 

Another college-goer, Sahiba Dewan, concurs, “You know what, the fun we were poking at FB, was also indirectly targeted at ourselves. How else would you define our addiction to a medium, which goes down only for 30 minutes, and you see everybody coming up with a funny liner. Perhaps, that’s the only time we use our imagination, instead of whiling away our time,” says Vinamra, as he retrospects over the outage phenomena. 

Even when the social media platform sprang back into action within 30 minutes, the humour in the tweets was the­re to stay, at least for the next few hours. The joyous tweets read: “Facebook is back. Now we can kill our time without worrying how to do it,” and “I bet there will be a page ‘I survived the 2014 Facebook outage’ within 30 seconds of the site going back online! #Facebook #facebo­­ok­down.” Facebookdown ended up being the trending hashtag on Twitter. 

 “Facebook was down for like 10 to 15 minutes. Related: Today is the most productive day according to office employees,” by @HecklerForever and many other tweets taking a dig at our own social behaviour, begs one question: Is it the meaninglessness of the mushrooming social media networks and virtual lives that we were targeting or is it a moral introspection of our own futile actions and existence online?