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The day Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down: Funniest memes and jokes

From Squid Game jokes to PBS and Metallica (yes, Metallica) weighing in, the outage was the talk of the internet on Monday.

Headshot of Gael Cooper
Headshot of Gael Cooper
Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, and generational studies Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read

How do you talk about Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram being down when you can't talk about the outage on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Many people turned to Twitter when the three Facebook-owned properties went down for about six hours on Monday. 

Squid Game memes

The South Korean series Squid Game has turned into a huge hit, so of course many of the memes played off the show. Squid Game is about people in desperate financial straits who enter a deadly tournament of children's games to try and win big money. Some memes featured those contestants reacting to the outage. 

A tweet from Netflix showed a contestant, labeled as Twitter, holding back a contestant labeled "Everyone" -- in the show, that gesture saves the first contestant's life.

And another showed the business card given to people invited to play in the deadly Squid Game tournament, with the text, "WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down. It's time, y'all."

Is it just me?

Non-Squid Game memes were plentiful too. Some memes played off users' initial confusion as to whether the sites were down for everyone, or just them.

Twitter saves the day?

Some memes were about Twitter as the one place site users could turn to and blab about the outage.

Even Twitter's official account got in on the joke, tweeting, "Hello literally everyone."

"Since FB and IG is down, Twitter Party y'all!!!!!!" one person wrote.

Another played off the "emergency meeting" part of the Among Us game, writing, "Everyone's having an emergency meeting at Twitter right now since FB and IG are down."

Here come the brands

Twitter wasn't the only official corporate site to jump in on the jokes. Brands can fall cringingly flat when they try for humor, but some of the outage jokes from corporate accounts were pretty funny.

"Gen Z is manning all the tech plat twitter accts and it's hysterical," wrote one person. "Best thread 2021."

PBS followed up on Twitter's tweet about welcoming everyone to its platform by quoting the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood song.

The band Metallica chimed in with "HEYYYYYY-AHHH!"

The Twitter account for The Sims game responded with Simlish for hello -- "sul sul."

And the Guinness Book of World Records account noted the "record for most people on Twitter at once has probably been smashed by now."

Starbucks, naturally, suggested the outage was the "perfect time for a coffee break."

And the Cup Noodles Twitter account (yes, there is one) had a very on-brand, all-caps response: "HI TWITTER!!! TECHNOLOGY IS A FUNNY THING!!! THAT'S WHY WE STICK TO NOODLES!!!"