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After a nearly six-hour outage, Facebook appears to be reconnected to the global internet, Cloudflare reported Monday afternoon. The affected services may take more time to recover. 

The flagship Facebook app, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Oculus services, all suffered a global outage beginning at around 11:44 am EDT. The social media giant's platforms went down because there was no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook's sites. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). 

According to Cloudflare, Facebook was reconnected as of 5:28 pm EDT. 

The outage inspired countless jokes and hot takes on Twitter and other corners of the internet that aren't part of the Facebook empire:

hello literally everyone

- Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021

People making jokes about the Facebook services going down make me sick. Anyone who was using an Oculus headset at the time is currently trapped in VR, and if they die there then they die in real life.

- Gavin Young (@GavinDYoung) October 4, 2021

If Facebook's monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should've been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021

As an update, books are still working. https://t.co/IwJyCZfUKx

- L.A. Public Library (@LAPublicLibrary) October 4, 2021

Social Media

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• 5 things to know about Meta's Threads app before you entangle your Instagram account
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• How to join and use Twitter rival Bluesky Social
• Instagram feed fix: How to see more of what you want (and less of what you don't)
• Micro-social media: What is it and which tools should you try?