Facebook Down, but Sadly Not Out

An Abused User Speaks Out

It was a moment of chaos and calm when Facebook went down yesterday, a moment of time I declared the Great Social Media Collapse of 2021. Facebook cited an “outage” as the reason they were down, but I think as we hear more from their whistleblower, this won’t be the last so-called outage as Facebook employees scramble to erase anything incriminating. I took a lot of time to think yesterday while my schedule was compromised by not having to try and appease the gods of social media. I was sad to see the quiet time end.

It wasn’t all quiet. I was on Twitter — a platform I am loathe to use — quite a bit. I and others danced on Facebook’s premature grave. I knew even then that any reports of its demise were exaggerated. I still lived it up like an employee whose abusive boss called in sick for the week.

As a writer and an editor, it was amazing to actually stop for six hours and think about how much of my daily schedule over the last few years has revolved around using Facebook and other platforms in a perpetual cycle of futility as the logarithms continued to hide my work and the work behind the journal I edit, Oddball Magazine.

Years of posting, and my efforts are all but invisible, viewable to only a handful of friends, and most times that’s only when I tag them. I get…