The night of October 4 was what a modern apocalypse may look like. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down, leaving creators, influencers, brands, and aam junta scrambling, panicking with ‘useless’ phones in their hand. As 2.7 billion social network users were left empty handed, messaging app Telegram was downloaded at break neck speed (70 million on the day), along with Signal. Many of the 2.7 billion flocked to Twitter, whose official handle proudly tweeted: “Hello literally everyone”; that post got 2.4 million likes. The three social media platforms that sunk into darkness also used the microblogging site to offer updates, along with thousands of meme creators who went crazy making jokes.

For India, the outage happened at around 9 pm, when the country was winding down. But in the Western world, the day was just beginning, and it was looking like they were staring at six hours of uncertainty. Santosh Janardhan, VP, Engineering and Infrastructure, Facebook, explained in a blog post, “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”