So yesterday afternoon Instagram just... stopped. Wouldn't refresh, wouldn't let me post a photo, kept spinning that little loading circle like it was thinking real hard about something. I figured it was my wifi at first, because that's always my first assumption and it's wrong about 80% of the time. Restarted the router anyway. Still broken. Then WhatsApp started acting up too, and Messenger, and at that point I gave up and did what everyone does now, which is check Twitter to see if everyone else is also mad about the same thing.
Turns out yes. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down more or less together starting sometime Wednesday afternoon, and as I'm typing this Thursday, some of it is still wonky for me. Photo uploads especially. I tried to post a picture of my lunch (a very unremarkable turkey sandwich, nothing the internet needed to see anyway) and it just sat there failing silently for ten minutes before I gave up.
What's funny is how much this rattled people. Not me particularly, I've got a website that's been running since 2011 and doesn't answer to anybody's outage dashboard, but you could feel it online, this low hum of "wait, what do I do with my hands now." People kept posting screenshots of the error message like it was a natural disaster. I saw someone call it "the day the internet broke," which, no, it very much did not. One company had a bad day. That's a different thing than "the internet," and I think we've gotten sloppy about treating them as the same.
Meanwhile this blog, which lives on a cheap little VPS I rent through Tricknowtech, didn't even hiccup. I don't say that to be smug about self-hosting, because honestly running your own thing has its own list of annoyances I could complain about for another thousand words. But there's something to be said for the boring stability of a dumb static-ish blog nobody's monetizing. Nothing to A/B test, nothing to break at scale, nothing for a config push to accidentally nuke for half the planet.
And the timing was almost funny, because Tuesday was the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web — the actual document, "Information Management: A Proposal," dated March 12, 1989. He wrote an open letter for the occasion, the usual mix of pride and worry, pointing out that the thing he built to share physics papers between colleagues turned into whatever it is now: surveillance ads, outrage feeds, and apparently a single point of failure for a few billion people's ability to send a voice memo to their mom. I don't think that's exactly what he had in mind in a CERN office in 1989. I don't think anyone could've had that in mind.
I'm not trying to make some grand point out of a company having a bad Wednesday. Outages happen, servers fall over, somebody's on-call engineer had a genuinely terrible 24 hours and I feel for them specifically, not their employer. But it is a little strange how much of daily life for a lot of people now runs through three apps owned by one company, to the point where a backend hiccup turns into actual news instead of a shrug. I remember when a website going down just meant the website was down. Now it means half your social life goes quiet for an afternoon.
Anyway. My sandwich photo still hasn't posted. I've decided that's fine. It wasn't a great sandwich.