Facebook Armageddon

23rd September 2010 8.30pm approx  GMT London Time - Marked in Diary as Facebook Armageddon.

For two and half long hours ( which felt like two and half weeks to some) our number one favourite social media site crashed, went down, had a technical error whatever you want to call it - Kaput! Leaving the cyber world in what I can only call mass social media panic.

Across the world 500 million people lost access to their Facebook "life" for a mere few hours.
Funny thing is, Facebook which went live in 2004-only 6 years ago- feels like it has been installed on our computers since the dawn of time. If asked I could easily have sworn that I remember being addicted to it much earlier than 2004! ( I think my brain is losing memory cells at double the rate in my thirties than my twenties ).  There was a similar outage in 2006, however since then, this was the worst mass panic that Facebook Engineering have reported. Mainly due to the fact that in 2006 Facebook only had a fraction of the users it has today so the momentum of upset caused was fairly limited.

Anyway, I was privy to this momentous occasion yesterday and it got me to considering my own sanity when I too found myself feeling a little distressed, even anxious, that I couldn't message back my brother-in-law with a smart arse reply to his comment he had left earlier in the day.

So this strange event occurred; people started to panic, forums started buzzing, REAL emails came into my account instead of Facebook notifications, MSN Messenger got a boost of people going back to using it for chat features, Twitter was awash with tweets of worry and concern, "is it just mine", "is yours off", "mines working", "mines not", "whats happening"and so on . Even the verified celebrities on Twitter showed concerns that their Facebook was offline.  The one however that stood out to me was "I cant believe it what am I going to do now with my life now?"..........

What did we do without our Facebook pages? I am forced to admit that I do love mine, however I can also tell you that I definitely could move on with my life if someone shut it down in the morning. Sure another one would spring up or people will return in droves to MySpace or worse still  it could bring around cause for the reinstatement of Bebo - yes Bebo! You heard me correctly the first time, Bebo is a dirty word now amongst social media gurus but you know many of us went to that cyber evil too even if the "cool" ones amongst us don't publicly admit it!

Last night, Zynga games addicts must have gone into mortal meltdown - Farms will have withered, Fish Tanks will have filled with dead fish, Cafes will have closed with spoiled foods, Cities will have been demolished and the Mafia probably all got arrested and put in prison. 

For the record I am not criticising the aforementioned games addicts, as the real irony is that I am privy to so much inside information due to the fact that when I was pregnant and had far too much time on my hands, I subscribed to them ALL. I realised it was getting out of control whilst in hospital for 6 days after the birth and I said to my fella - "I cant believe it my farms gonna be dead now and I was so close to Level 55?????"
I was on a copious amount of morphine painkillers and that is the excuse that I shall remain with for such absolute moronic worry over an imaginary farm that required daily attention.

The outage got me to thinking though; 
Would I have contacts for the few hundred "friends" I have? Probably not.
Would I make endless chatter to people I normally wouldn't  just because they have a shiny green dot next to them and they are online? Probably not.
Would I subscribe to hundreds of fan pages just because they asked me? Probably not.
Would I find myself compelled to reeling through the news reel every day and clicking like?  Probably not.
Would I miss the pages of the most unflattering pictures of me ever taken - which are coincidentally then posted and tagged for the world to see? ABSOLUTELY NOT!


However I also had to consider the other aspects;
Who cares if you had Weetabix for breakfast and your coffee was cold?
Who cares if its your birthday?
Who cares if you have had the worst day of your life and just want to vent some anger?
Who cares if you are selling cheap tickets to Glastonbury because you broke up with your boyfriend?
Who cares if you need advice or support for your newborn baby which wont sleep at night?
Who cares if you don't want to be my friend anymore?
The irony of my post; WHO CARES?.......................I DO!