There was an uproar on all social media platforms when Instagram stopped functioning yesterday, March 13. Since Instagram was inaccessible, people took the initiative to go onto Twitter and share their thoughts.
The shutdown took over Twitter, with half of the site’s trending hashtags revolving around it. The top-trending ones were #InstagramBlackout2019 and #instagramdown, where users worldwide flooded the page with memes and complaints.
Many celebrities took part in this. Among them, Disney actress Skai Jackson tweeted, “The Instagram models are going NUTS as we speak.” Additionally, Nickelodeon actor and Youtuber Josh Peck tweeted out, “With Facebook and Instagram down, Borders and Barnes and Noble have just reopened all their stores.”
Among Townsend Harris students, the shutdown stirred confusion. Sophomore Nanami Santacruz said, “I deleted the app and I ended up not being able to log in completely.
Also lost, junior Shannon Thomas shared that she thought the glitch had something to do with her wifi connection. “But then I just found out that it was everyone else’s Instagram and Facebook as well,” she said.
Freshman Michela Zlope shared how she constantly forgot and opened the app just to refresh the same page. “I didn’t really know what to do with my time anymore,” she elaborated. Meanwhile, sophomore Aruna Buhdram stated, “It’s probably a wake-up call for a lot of people because we’re a little too dependent on these apps.”
Other students, like junior Shane Werther, remained oblivious. When asked about his feelings on the incident he responded, “It’s down?”
Instagram tweeted at 3:03 p.m ET, about 3 hours after the shutdown, “We’re aware of an issue impacting people’s access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP,” but the app was finally fixed 7 hours later, allowing everyone to resort back to their normal lives.
Although the shutdown was bothersome to many, the overall situation was amusing. In the end, it seems that many realized their obsessive dependencies on social media, and coped by using Twitter to poke fun at the situation.
