The collapse of social media is not the apocalypse for digital editors

When the world's biggest websites fell over – the technical term – in the middle of Theresa May's Brexit vote, this is how readers still found us

This week, as the world looked on at the Brexit omnishambles and Boeing grounding its deeply troubled 737 Max fleet, another storm was brewing.

On Wednesday at around 4pm GMT, a number of the world’s biggest websites, to put it technically, fell over, resulting in mass outages, broken pages and buggy functionality. Big hitters including Facebook, Instagram, Etsy and Whatsapp all experienced issues, while a slightly shaky Twitter soldiered on, providing frustrated users an outlet to vent their spleens with memes and videos.

It took 14 hours for Facebook to get its main site working as normal, along with its Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp sites. This is the longest outage in the company’s history, and there’s still no public statement about exactly what happened. As tech editor and Facebook aficionado Andrew Griffin reported on the night, Facebook confirmed that the remarkable outage was not caused by a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). Simply put, many initially thought that it could be a malicious attack on the servers where Facebook exists, by bombarding them with so many requests that they couldn’t keep up. It is with a certain sense of irony that Facebook had to use its competitor, Twitter, to tell us this wasn’t the case.