The social media blackout: What has the world come to?
Al Jazeera
The outage of Facebook platforms brought some of us back to what life used to be before social media.
When the great social media blackout of October 4, 2021, struck, I was in the picturesque village of Himarë in southern Albania with my feet propped up on a balcony railing, half-gazing at the Ionian Sea, while impatiently awaiting Al Jazeera’s publication of my latest article on New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
As the blackout happened to coincide with a local internet outage, I first dedicated myself to cursing the Albanian networks and manically refreshing all open tabs on my laptop.
When the internet returned but the components of Mark Zuckerberg’s digital empire – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – still failed to load, I sped over to Twitter to see what was wrong with the world.
