However, many people may be missing Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook is down as well as associated apps around many parts of the world:

"Madory said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn. The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like "facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it."

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-suffer-worldwide-outage-20211005-p58x7g.html

In an extraordinary coincidence, the outage occurred while Facebook was under increased scrutiny after a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal exposed fundamental problems with the site, as well as a 60 Minutes interview with a Facebook whistleblower.

"Revealing her identity on national television, Haugen described a company so committed to product optimization that it embraced algorithms that amplify hate speech. "It's paying for its profits with our safety," Haugen told 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley."

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/3/22707860/facebook-whistleblower-leaked-documents-files-regulation

Not just the infamous swamp of Facebook but also Instagram was revealed as dangerously messed up:

"The Journal's report highlighted specific findings from the document as evidence of a broader mental health problem on the app — most notably the finding that "thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.""

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagram-mental-health-research-pdfs-documents

So a coincidence that Facebook is down currently or has the company done a quick manoeuvre to remind all its users how much they would miss Facebook if it was gone or has a rogue hacker taken the giant down? I'm going to bet on coincidence, mainly because Facebook is probably aware of how many of its users have a love-hate relationship with the platform and many users might enjoy the respite a bit too much and never come back.

I may have a distorted view though. I mainly access it to see what terrible people are saying and while the site is full of terrible people, they all hate Facebook as well. However, Facebook works for many people who vocally loathe Facebook. For example:

"That's always easy for people for people who nobody cares what they write to tell me how I should communicate. Back in practical reality if I am able to post on Facebook and people share it there, my articles get read by another 20,000 people. If it goes viral, 100k easily. But thanks for the advice.

https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/09/10/this-week-in-politics-its-all-bullshit-and-were-fucked/#comment-105485

Correia repeatedly gets locked out of his Facebook account for various reasons and in general, over the years he has shifted more of his signature outrage to Facebook and used his blog more for more bland author self-promotion. I believe him when he portrays this as a business decision. The two things aren't unrelated: it is good for his business (i.e. promoting his personal brand and attracting new readers) to play up the foul-mouthed-culture-warrior bit on Facebook even though that gets him repeatedly sent to Facebook-jail. He's not going to find himself "censored" on his own blog but it is more profitable to be more outrageous on Facebook, even though that leads to intermittent bans on him posting on Facebook.

Facebook has been implicated in at least one genocide (https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/ ) and while it is not the only cause of a lot of modern disinformation, the world will be a little better today for its absence.

This free site is ad-supported. Learn more
​