A meme-fest on Twitter as #InternetShutdown affected several websites
Multiple outages hit the internet on Tuesday, shutting down several media, government and social media websites across the world. Leading websites operated by news outlets such as the Financial Times and The New York Times, and e-commerce sites like Amazon were down but restored later. Other sites that were impacted included HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, and Vimeo. The outages lasted for a few minutes to an hour. Some reports suggested that there was a glitch at a US-based cloud computing services provider but more details were awaited.
As an investigation was underway to find out what exactly happened, users on social media platforms that were not affected by the outages shared funny memes and began wondering “is this the end”.
Some users suggested they were back to playing Solitaire like the good, old days when the internet was a new and scarce commodity.
Some others took a dig at those clamouring on social media about the shutdown using a perfectly fine internet connection.
There were also those who took the opportunity to make fun of social media influencers, who rely on Internet platforms to reach their audience.
Others just had some real fun when most users were struggling to come back online or do anything meaningful.
According to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com, nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon.
Most websites that went down showed a “503 error” code on their pages when a user tried to reach that website. The problem was caused by a glitch at American cloud service provider Fastly. It said on its service status website (which was working) it had identified the issue and fixed it.
Later, a Reuters report stated that several websites hit by the outage were coming back online.
The outages could have impacted those trying to book slots for COVID-19 vaccination to make reservations for immediate travel.
Click for more
trending news