Getty Twitter shared a tweet joking about the Facebook outage.
During a long-lasting outage involving Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Twitter officially acknowledged the large number of people flocking to its platform with a tweet. Even Facebook and Instagram had to officially post about the crash on Twitter since all of their services were down.
Twitter Wrote: ‘Hello Literally Everyone’
While everyone was waiting for news about what’s next in the Facebook and Instagram outage that has affected people around the world, Twitter joined in with a funny tweet of their own. The official Twitter account addressed the massive number of people flocking to the website.
With a simple tweet, Twitter wrote: “hello literally everyone.”
The tweet quickly went viral. As of the time of this article’s publication, it was already at more than 470,000 likes.
WhatsApp’s official account quickly replied, tweeting “hello!” with a waving hand emoji.
@Twitter 👋 hello!
One person replied with a meme about people coming to Twitter right now and Twitter responded, “real ones were already here.”
In reply to one person’s tweet about how many people are on Twitter right now, Twitter replied: “quite literally.”
McDonald’s official Twitter account got in on the fun too.
Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram Have Turned to Twitter to Share Updates
All of Facebook’s platforms have been forced to share their updates on Twitter since all of their services are down. Even Facebook’s status update page is down because the page is hosted on Facebook’s domain, which is crashed.
WhatsApp tweeted about an hour after the outage started, writing: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”
We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.
Thanks for your patience!
Then about 30 minutes later the app updated its followers with a new tweet that read: “It’s not you, it’s us. Working on a fix asap.”
@rajhansrohit It’s not you, it’s us. Working on a fix asap
Facebook’s official Twitter accounted didn’t reply to the tweet, but did post an update around the same time as WhatsApp’s original update. The account wrote: “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 apologize for any inconvenience.”
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 apologize for any inconvenience.
While WhatsApp has been interacting a bit since the original tweet, Facebook’s official Twitter account hasn’t posted an update since.
Instagram’s official InstagramComms Twitter account also didn’t reply to Twitter’s message. But the account did post an update for users at the same time as Facebook and WhatsApp’s original posts.
Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown
The account wrote: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!”
Instagram’s Page Has Shared 5xx Errors
While the exact cause of the crash has not been determined, users can glean more about what’s happening based on Instagram’s website returning 5xx errors.
Blue Frontier reported in a general story about 5xx errors (not about Instagram specifically) that a 5xx error is “generated by the server, not the website.” Because the error is shown in the operating system, you can see the error whether you’re accessing a site through a desktop computer, your phone, or a tablet.
Often a more detailed error will be returned to explain just what the 5xx error means, such as a 502 (bad gateway), 500 (internal server error) or 503 (service unavailable). But in this case, Instagram has only been returning a “5xx error” message.
You can learn more about the 5xx error in Heavy’s story here.
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