Facebook, Instagram, and other apps owned by Facebook were experiencing difficulties on Monday, Oct. 4 at around 10:40 a.m. The apps had issues for nearly six hours before they were up and running again. This was the biggest outage that Facebook apps had experienced since the day-long outage in 2019 which occurred due to a technical error.

“It was pretty interesting when Facebook went down. A lot of people who I talked to just went to other apps like Twitter,” Mr. Andrew Lee said. “When things like that happen everyone hears about it because people are bummed they can’t use the social media apps they use every day.”

The outage was a big inconvenience to the over 3.5 billion people who rely on social media platforms for communication, a source of income, entertainment, and as platforms to spread political messages.

“It’s really inconvenient when some of the major social media platforms go down because all you want to see is those sweet pics,” junior Ethan Olson said. “It’s just good to see what’s going on in people’s lives and when it goes down you just don’t have that ability anymore.” 

The difficulties occurred right after the scrutiny Facebook has been placed under due to the former product manager of Facebook, Frances Haugen, coming forward with information regarding Facebook’s conduct and policies alleging they promote division and that their business practices harm kids.