Facebook and its family of apps, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, were down for several hours during Monday evening, illustrating how dependent the world has become on these platforms. All over the world, people use these platforms to communicate with friends and family, get informed and distribute their own messages, and promote their work. An outage like that is unusual, and we can say that the impact was severe.

How did you feel? How did you spend your evening without these platforms? Here are some confessions of this forced detox!

Confession #1

Let’s start by saying I am an expat in Belgium. This means that to reach my parents, relatives, and friends, I rely on IM apps, mainly WhatsApp. A small breakdown of my afternoon yesterday during Facebook’s outage.

17:36 I leave the office, and I try to call my mother on WhatsApp. Unsuccessful attempt.

18:15 Once at home, I retry. I start blaming my Internet provider.

18:30 I become aware of the outage. I curse because I was organising a Christmas trip with my friends and now, we have no way of talking.

In the time span between each of these moments, I realised that I was left empty-handed. There was no other way for me to communicate (normal calls from Belgium abroad are too expensive), and I was shut down from the world. Most people in my same situation had no other option, and I don’t want here to argue about these apps’ monopoly, but about our attitude: our social life and communication rely on platforms most of the time we don’t even choose and, although we could have alternatives, the despair for the outage has been so much that it didn’t come to me to use something else. I needed a recipe I saved on Facebook, but the loading went on forever. Later, I thought I might have simply googled the recipe!

18:50 I make peace with the outage, and I forget about the phone. I dedicate myself to cooking a delicious dinner.

I felt better: I didn’t have to pretend for the evening not to read all the messages I get on WhatsApp, I didn’t have to feel bad because I didn’t want to answer, no need for pointless conversations and tons of messages to decide when and where we are going to meet with who. Meetings that are constantly rescheduled with last-minute cancellations. All of this because IM make us live in a reality where everything can constantly change, and nothing is definitive.

20:22 My phone rings, and I am scared; I didn’t expect any message to come through!

This was the highlight of the evening. I was surprised by it more than by a stranger stepping into my apartment suddenly. How could have somebody contacted me?? How was it possible? It was my sister who had done a further step and hadn’t accepted the communication block. She contacted me through Signal; apparently, I was the only one she could reach for that evening. She spoiled my idyll of a night without a mobile phone. Let’s admit it: it is easier to be forced not to use it instead of undertaking a detox diet.

The truth is: we live in a platform world!

Confession #2

I had a typical Monday morning in Brussels. As an international student, I went to my internship, and I followed a course on campus. Until late in the afternoon, I did not really check my phone and social media. As a person who is not really active on social media, it was just another busy day for me.

Around 20:00, a friend called me saying that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc., were down for several hours and there was no other way to contact me. I remember myself laughing at first, as I did not notice anything! When time passed, I realized that social media were still down, and I could not scroll on my newsfeed, which is my daily habit. It was so annoying for a couple of minutes! 

However, this incident made me think! Our everyday life is spinning around social media. Social interactions take place online, and when something is wrong, we panic. And then random questions popped up in my mind: 

-Why did we panic?

-Can we live for a day without having access to social media? 

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions were subjective. We decide to panic, and we keep forgetting about our alternatives. Could we change this habit?

All these thoughts accompanied me to bed, and instead of “punishing” for my reaction, I decided to sleep on this phrase: “Of course we live in a technologically advanced world, but human connections exist out of social media and life continues out of the digital world”.

Confession #3

Going home from work around 6 pm…connecting to my Whatsapp and trying to call my friend to discuss our day, but nothing! Trying to call my brother, but nothing! My mother, still nothing! All of my efforts have been in vain! Moments later, I realised that Facebook and Instagram were not working, too! Just looking around to discover the reactions of others, or was I the only one? I tried to figure out why everything was down. my first thought was that something happened to my phone’s internet connection, but no, that was not the case; other apps were working normally. My curiosity led me to various google searches and from one article to another to find out that these platforms stopped working around 4 pm on Monday (04/10). ”Is this even possible?” I started thinking…titles like ”will FB ever be back?”, ”What should we expect?”, ”Gone in minutes, out of hours”, kept coming again, and different scenarios took their place to my already upset mind. The time was passing, and still, I was not able to call anyone! As I was walking back home with my thoughts, I accidentally met two friends, and we decided to grab a quick coffee. We enjoyed a one-hour coffee, sharing our news and having fun (with not even one reference to the social networks outage!!!).

At around 7.30 pm, I headed home. It was not long before I received a call from my mother (of course not through Whatsapp or FB); she was so upset, as she could not find me and the calls to Belgium are normally expensive. Once I explained to her the situation, she calmed down. I was fine with that, ”finally an evening without all these networking platforms, I thought”, but again I tried to connect through Wi-Fi once I entered home (of course, that was not possible).

I just had to accept it! And actually, the rest of my evening was quite calm and interesting; I prepared my favourite meal and sorted out some old and new books. At around 12.00 pm, my phone started making crazy sounds of endless messages and calls from friends and family through these platforms. I started smiling; why I felt so relieved?

At the end of the day, we should accept that we cannot imagine a reality without these platforms; How will our lives be without these platforms? What would have happened if this outage lasted longer than just some hours? Is our world dependent on these platforms? Let’s all take some time and reflect!

Confession #4

My experience started just before 4 o’clock, at the time, I had no idea what was happening. I had a scheduled visit to a museum, and I was going to meet with a friend there, but even though I was trying to contact her via Instagram, the messages were never sent. Thankfully, everything went well, and I met her on the stairs of the museum after reaching out to her via a phone call.

After the 2 hours visit, we headed out, and I tried to answer all the unread messages that I had received, but the task seemed impossible because every time I tried nothing was being delivered. I thought there was some kind of a problem with my internet data because I use roaming services, so I just decided to wait until I could get hold of a Wi-Fi network. In the meantime, I received an SMS message from a friend, and it really got me puzzled cause the last time an actual person texted me via SMS was probably 10 years ago.
Around 7 pm, I returned home, opened the Wi-Fi and realized that all of the problems I had were just a result of a Facebook outage. Until then, I hadn’t realized that because I felt completely cut off from the internet. Facebook services are just a small fraction of the online world but are a large fraction of our daily lives.

When Instagram has problems, I use Facebook messenger, when Facebook messenger has problems I use WhatsApp and when something big happens on the internet I learn about it in just a few minutes through my Facebook feed. This time though, I had no access to any of these Facebook platforms and I had to find new ways to communicate with my friends. It’s a real disarray when you resort to talking with your friends through LinkedIn and Viber.

I went to sleep around 12 o’clock at night and my apps were still non-factional but at least I spent the evening watching people on TikTok and Twitter talking about their own experience with the Facebook outage. I just hope for us all to not have to experience that another time and that in the future, the apps we use in our daily lives won’t be managed by one big corporation.