Zuckerberg becomes the talk of 'X'-town as Meta faces global outage: Inside the netizens' meme-fest

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become the talk of the X (formerly twitter) town after the social media networks associated with his company--Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered a global outage late Wednesday.

Shortly after users from the three platforms started experiencing trouble and were unable to access content, they turned to Elon Musk-owned X to share their complaints, which soon turned into a meme-fest.

From comparing Mark Zuckerberg with Elon Musk to criticising the Meta founder, users took hilarious videos and conveyed their message through satirical content.


"Mark Zuckerberg watching everybody leave Instagram and Facebook for Twitter," wrote one user.

While another quipped with: "Mark Zuckerberg fixing the WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crash>>".

Here are some of the most quirky takes on the Meta outage by netizens.

Meta globally down: What had happened?

Meta's platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—suffered a widespread outage on Wednesday, impacting users in countries across the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the US.

The disruption began around 6 PM GMT, with over 22,000 Facebook users and more than 18,000 WhatsApp users reporting issues on outage-tracking site Downdetector.

The problems ranged from being completely unable to access the apps to difficulties refreshing feeds.

Meta quickly acknowledged the outage and stated that its team was working to resolve the issues. This follows a similar, large-scale outage in 2021, which saw Meta's services down for nearly six hours.

Meta's response to the outage

Meta addressed the issue on X, saying: "Thanks for bearing with us! We're 99% of the way there - just doing some last checks. We apologize to those who've been affected by the outage."


WhatsApp and Instagram also confirmed their services were back online via X. WhatsApp wrote: "And we're back, happy chatting!" while Instagram posted: "Andddd we're back - sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us."



Meta has not disclosed the exact cause of the outage.

TechCrunch speculated that OpenAI’s integration with Apple’s iOS 18.2 might have led to an influx of traffic that overwhelmed the company’s servers.

The Conversation suggested that the outage, which affected all of Meta's platforms, could point to "a single point of failure" — a critical system relied upon by all of Meta's services, without which they could not function.