A businessman in Atlanta changed his passwords because he thought his phone had been hacked.
A Long Island woman who sells vintage items on Instagram lost revenue when she was forced to cancel a sale event. And a graduate student in Texas, freed from the distractions of social media, whipped through four assignments.
For some six hours Monday, the ripple effects of Facebook’s massive outrage reverberated across the US and around the world.
From Mumbai to Mexico City, billions of people were abruptly cast adrift when Facebook vanished from the internet and its family of platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, stopped loading new content.
The impact was felt almost everywhere. Facebook alone has almost 3 billion users — more than a third of the world’s population. As one web analyst told CNN, for a lot of people, “Facebook is the internet.”
