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ICYMI, Instagram Was Down… & X/Twitter Was Memeing It

Remember that one day in August 2014 when Instagram went down and it felt like the world was ending, otherwise known as the great Instagram outage? I was 12 years old and unable to see any new posts from my favorite One Direction fan accounts, so obviously I was going crazy. It feels like I’m 12 years old again because, well, Instagram and Facebook went down on March 5. And this time, Twitter/X is memeing it. 

On the morning of March 5, thousands of Instagram users reported that their feed wasn’t updating, and Facebook users reported login errors; monitoring service Downdetector saw error reports spike to more than 500,000 reports as of 11 a.m. Am I one of the 500,000? Maybe. 

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X/Twitter

The outage comes ahead of a deadline on Wednesday for Meta to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law aiming to increase competition in the digital economy, The New York Times reported. The law requires the companies to overhaul how some of their products work so that smaller competitors can access their users.

Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg can do literally nothing right. X/Twitter had a lot to say about the outage, and users weren’t showing any mercy. 

Am I repeatedly checking even though I know the results will be exactly the same? Yeah, unfortunately. 

X/Twitter, you are temporarily our only saving grace. 

Really feeling bad for their interns right now, praying for y’all. 

Time to touch grass!

Instagram and Facebook being down isn’t the end of the world, but it definitely feels like it. Let’s all pray that we get through this together, just kidding, it’s the perfect time to do a social media detox. It’s time to put down the phone — because I promise you Instagram won’t magically come back to life after 15 attempts to refresh your feed — and maybe do some self-care activities, like binging your favorite reality TV show

Julia is a national writer at Her Campus, where she mainly covers mental health, wellness, and all things relating to Gen Z. Prior to becoming a national writer, Julia was the wellness intern for Her Campus. Outside of Her Campus, Julia is a managing editor at The Temple News, Temple University's independent student-run paper. She's also the Co-Campus Correspondent of Her Campus Temple University, where she oversees content for all sections of the website. Julia is also a student intern at the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting, where she works on the data desk and is assisting her editor in building a database. She has previously interned at The American Prospect. In her free time, Julia enjoys going to the beach as much as possible, watching reality TV (specifically Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules), and editing stories.