I can bet that in the last 3 hours this has been the most popular topic trending the globe. At about 4.22pm today GMT+1 I noticed that my WhatsApp messages were sent but not getting delivered. Like any normal person I thought it might have been that my mobile data had expired or that my home wifi needed a reboot. But I later discovered I wasn’t the only one experiencing connectivity issues. My friend whom I called experienced the same problem on his WhatsApp. I went to Instagram and it was not loading. That’s when I went online and got a better glimpse of the scale of the problem:

Since Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were all down I decided to find out what was happening in the news:

And next I was curious to find out what was trending on Twitter in Nigeria and of course I wasn’t surprised:

Whilst I’m sure that this issue will be resolved (eventually) it does make you wonder what effect this downtime is having on people and businesses. WhatsApp has assured subscribers that the issue is being worked on:

I can imagine people being forced to use other alternatives to chat in the interim; SMS, RCS, MS Teams, etc. My heart goes out to everyone celebrating birthdays today who were looking forward to getting likes, comments and messages. For others, this downtime might mean a chance to finally get up to stretch the legs and go for that long-suppressed wee.

Hopefully this incident will remind us of how dependent we’ve become on technology and for us to ALWAYS have alternatives to EVERYTHING in life so you’re not caught unawares or left in the dark.

Do let me know what your experience has been today not having access to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for a number of hours? I would love to hear from you 🙂