Photo: REX USA/Rex.
Facebook isn't cool anymore. Though the social-media giant still boasts over one billion (!) active users worldwide, the cultural cognoscenti has turned to platforms like Instagram and Twitter to taste-make and trend-set.
Facebook's drastic drop in cool cred was never more apparent than today, when it briefly went offline. This writer in particular, had no idea the social network was down until this story was assigned.
The outage occurred around 12 p.m. ET, which means mothers desperate to post photos of their children's first swimming lessons and newly engaged couples chomping at the bit to share their good news were left twiddling their thumbs.
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At around 1:45 p.m, users were greeted with the following message: "Traffic and error-rates are almost back to normal after a coordinated intervention by our engineering teams. We are now monitoring the situation and we have our best engineers determining the root-cause of this issue that affected much of our web fleet. We apologize for any inconvenience and we aim to ensure that this issue does not repeat."
Meh.
It wasn't so long ago that Facebook was the de facto forum to post and discuss the day's happenings. When Michael Jackson died in 2009, news feeds everywhere were transformed into an endless stream of updates and makeshift memorials. Today, when a major story breaks, Facebook is no longer where we go to get news or gauge reactions. That distinction belongs to Twitter.
While Facebook isn't in danger of joining Myspace and Friendster in the social-media graveyard anytime soon, today's outage certainly didn't have the ripple effect it would have had in the past.
Also, can you share this article on Facebook please?