What! Facebook's down? No storm selfies during brief outage

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — No storm selfies, hookups, status updates. With Facebook and Instagram down for nearly an hour overnight, what were legions of users to do?

Turn to Twitter, of course. To talk about Facebook. The hashtag "#facebookdown" generated a cascade of tweets, including an image of a T-shirt with the words "I survived #facebookdown." Companies such as Coca-Cola took it as a viral marketing opportunity.






Of course companies that depend on Facebook and Instagram to reach their customers, like the dating app Tinder, had to wait. More than 7,500 websites had services affected by the Facebook outage, according to Web tracking firm DynaTrace.

For most, though, it was just a blip. While Facebook certainly has become an important communications tool for some 1.35 billion people worldwide, a temporary shutdown does not have the same crippling effect as the loss of electricity, water, the Internet or a city's public transit system. It's also a lesson, perhaps, in what happens when we rely heavily on a free service that, while very stable, cannot promise 100 percent uptime.


Source:
http://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/Facebook-suffers-outage-affecting-users-worldwide-6042056.php