“Facebook went offline this week. Experts say we should log out too.” by Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman discusses the recent outage in which Facebook and its platforms, including Instagram, were unusable, and the ways in which it affected people, positively and negatively. This mere accidental outage was used as a means for assessing the codependency we, as a society, have when it comes to social media.

Guiliani-Hoffman, to no surprise, explained that this forced break from the social networking tool created panic, boredom, and fear of missing out because people weren’t able to keep up with their social media and interact with others online. But, she also turned this into a positive, explaining that some people felt as though the outage caused the opposite effect, in that because nobody could access these platforms, there was nothing to feel left out about. On a certain level, during Covid-19, I felt this way in the sense that because everybody was forced to be home, there was really nothing to feel left out about or be left out of. Guiliani-Hoffman also gives us a statistic about the increased usage of social media in the recent years, saying that “Seven in 10 adult Facebook users in the US say they visit the site at least once a day, and 49% report visiting several times a day, according to Pew Research Center 2021 data. Some 59% of people visit Instagram at least once a day, with 38% visiting several times daily.” Again, this is no surprise to me, as I am guilty of checking social media, including these platforms, multiple times a day, even when it is not very interesting. She goes on to say that the people who check and use social media the most are often those that tend to be the loneliest because they aren’t in a face-to-face connection.

Lastly, one of the authors makes a point that piqued my interest and got me thinking about how social media can be seen as an epidemic, rather than just social media, pointing out that “’The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation,’”. Thinking about this was extremely unsettling because even though I know it’s true, it’s difficult to wrap your head around the idea that social media can be compared to something as serious as drugs, and give off the same effects. Yet nobody is doing anything to hinder the addiction. I would say this Facebook outage was a blessing in disguise.