Various memes were shared by Filipinos on Twitter after Facebook and its other affiliated social networking services went dark for almost six hours on Monday night.
News outlets started reporting about the outage minutes before 12 midnight, citing that some users cannot access Facebook and Messenger.
Others also reported issues when accessing Instagram.
READ: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp hit by global outage
By past 12 a.m., Facebook’s Twitter account apologized for the outage and said that it was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
It was only on 6:33 a.m. (Philippine time) of the next day when the social networking giant reported that some of its apps and services were “coming back online.”
READ: Facebook, Instagram appear to partly reconnect after nearly six-hour outage
The hashtag “#InternetShutDown” continuously trended on local Twitter following the incident.
Filipinos, who were previously reported to be the global leader when it comes to time spent on social media, shared memes in response to the hours-long outage which spotlighted Twitter, a microblogging platform.
Twitter was not affected by the outage since it is spearheaded by a different owner.
Some users of the microblogging platform referenced South Korean hit survival drama series “Squid Game” in response to the situation.
Congrats to Twitter, Tiktok, Gmail, Reddit, Amazon, MySpace and Google. You have made it to round 2.🥳#facebookdown Snapchat Instagram Whatsapp Hackers Anonymous #InternetShutDown pic.twitter.com/SVKCwsovTj
— 𝒟𝒶𝓇𝓎𝓁𝓁 🌞 (@crispysago2002) October 4, 2021
Who now holds the top spot?
any ideas?#facebookdown #FBandIG #InternetShutDown #MarkZuckerburg pic.twitter.com/Kku5oYhFdJ— Jessneil (@JessneilC) October 4, 2021
Other Twitter users uploaded popular photos that have been consistently used as meme templates.
Twitter be like. Lols. Chillin like a villain 😅 #InternetShutDown https://t.co/h8eQEP8H8S
— 𝒶𝒷𝒷𝓎𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 (@abbydaray) October 4, 2021
Congrats to Twitter, You have made it to round 2.🥳#facebookdown #instagramdown #whatsappdown #Messengerdown #InternetShutDown pic.twitter.com/CMOAAvc1Ug
— 𝒟𝒶𝓇𝓎𝓁𝓁 🌞 (@crispysago2002) October 4, 2021
Some also referenced the recently-concluded Miss World Philippines 2021 when its titleholder, Tracy Maureen Perez, slipped on stage after being crowned.
#InternetShutDown pic.twitter.com/nEFTkU8pV4
— Ash #ManggagawaNaman2022 (@imbremer) October 4, 2021
Reuters said that the outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
READ: Whistleblower says Facebook put profit before reining in hate speech
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
