Hi, there. Here are some of the things we’d be sharing to Facebook—if Facebook (and its siblings, including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Occulus VR) hadn’t been slammed by a worldwide outage:
‘This is epic.’ Updating coverage: That’s how one internet analyst describes the historic magnitude of today’s Facebook fail.
■ It’s the company’s worst outage since 2008.
■ The Wall Street Journal: While Facebook is largely a recreational thing for its U.S. audience, WhatsApp is an essential communications channel for many nations.
■ New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel: Facebook workers were unable to enter buildings to address the outage because their access badges stopped working.
■ The Verge: “The problem is apparently DNS (it’s always DNS).”
■ Ars Technica is digging deep into the tech of what’s app—er, what’s up.
‘Some people are having trouble …’ Facebook’s only public statement for hours was a remarkably understated note posted to, embarrassingly enough, Twitter …
■ … which was unaffected, giving Twitter’s founder a license to shill.
■ Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth plummeted nearly $7 billion as the outage wore on.
And in non-Facebook news you might otherwise have encountered on Square’s Facebook page:
■ Gov. Pritzker says he’ll want to see a further decline in COVID-19 transmission before he lifts Illinois’ indoor mask mandate.
■ President Biden’s coming to Chicago after all—Thursday.
■ The president has killed a Trump-era rule that kept family planning clinics that receive federal aid from referring women to abortion services.
■ A Chicago police officer shot a man this morning in what the department calls an armed domestic dispute.
Tell your friends—at least those you can reach when Facebook’s down—that this demonstrates why getting Chicago Public Square by email is a thing worth doing. (And Square’s on Twitter, too.)