On Wednesday of this week, all Meta services — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads — were down for a few hours. This did not prevent the Jean-Kévins from speaking out.
Unknown fault
Unlike other service outages, the outage on Facebook materialized in an original way. Suddenly disconnected, we are asked to reconnect. Facebook does not recognize the password, you change it and even after changing, Facebook does not recognize the password.
A quick look at Twitter and we see that we are not the only person to no longer have access to the social network and to encounter exactly the same technical antics. The good news is that this is not an individual or targeted account hack.
Meta has not communicated on the origin of the failure, leaving the field open to all kinds of hypotheses. In a pinch, as long as the service is available again and there are no data leaks, the reasons are not that important.
The main thing is to have recovered the different services linked to Meta. The only “worry” if we can put it that way: there are still idiots who come and preach.
Moraline at low cost
Having noticed that I was not the only one affected by this outage, I posted a message on Twitter, Mastodon and Blue Sky to indicate that the outage was general and that we had to be patient.
That’s when some idiot popped up in my mentions telling me that the problem was that I was using Facebook. I didn’t bother to answer him, these kinds of people only deserve proper masking.
Yes, I use Facebook. Because for one of my activities, it is one of my main sources of traffic. Because I am a moderator in several groups dedicated to Mallorca and among the moderators I am the only one who spends most of her days in front of a computer screen.
Have I tried to diversify my traffic sources? Obviously. But, just like my traffic in Arcadia comes a lot (too much) from Twitter, my traffic to French people in Mallorca comes mainly from Facebook. I am constantly trying to create new sources of traffic so as not to depend on one social network. At the moment this doesn’t work. And the last thing I need is Jean-Kévin coming to lecture me.
Leave us alone
Generally speaking, no matter what you say on a social network, there will always be a bored Jean-Kévin or Marie-Karen, to explain to you that you are making bad choices. Believing themselves to be invested with a divine mission, they corrupt the discussion spaces to explain that you are an imbecile.
We are not talking about expressing disagreement on an open question or topic. But, those who bring it back constantly, on anything and everything. I tend to think there are people who haven’t been beaten up enough to bring her back that much.
This virus of inexpensive morality has also invaded television sets. I came close to breaking down nervously during the farmers’ revolt when I heard the bosses of hard discount store chains explain that the French must spend more on food. I invite them to come live in my neighborhood, just to see.
The Church has disappeared from our daily lives, it has been replaced by social networks and the media which deliver our daily moral lesson. The difference being that the priest, the parish priest, the pastor, the pope, the imam or the rabbi are invested with authority. Today, any idiot believes he is entitled to dictate his wishes to his neighbor.
A breakdown and consequences
Beyond my very anecdotal case, the Meta outage affected other categories of people. First of all, all the people who directly earn their living thanks to social networks. We think of influencers, very present on Instagram, but also of businesses. It is my opinion that Meta will have commercial issues to resolve with the entities that took advertisements that could not be broadcast.
As chance sometimes makes things go wrong, the outage occurred during Super Tuesday, this great electoral event in the United States. We know that abstention is breaking records in this country and that Americans are faced with an election that is not a dream come true. Objectively, remaking the Biden-Trump match is as exciting as the Macron-Le Pen match.
Social networks are heavily used in the United States to encourage people to go to the polls on a non-working weekday. Some personalities, like Taylor Swift, speak out precisely to encourage people to move. Fortunately, the outage did not last long: services were available again around 6 p.m. in mainland France. That is, barely the start of the day in certain American states.
We can deplore this, but the reality is that a large number of people get their information thanks to social networks. Is it a problem ? Yes. Do we collectively have the solution to this problem? No. Will annoying people — to put it politely — make them change their attitude? No. If you want to lecture someone, go talk to your fridge.