Panic in the Livingroom!

There was an outage this morning for Meta. So Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down. But it was a weird glitchy outage. You got a message saying your session timed out but then it wouldn't let you log back in for Facebook. For Instagram it just wouldn't refresh your feed. 

I tried logging in a couple of times and then did a "Is Facebook Down?" search to see if it was just me or if it was a systemwide thing. Systemwide, cool. 

Because when I couldn't log back in I was worried for a second that either my account had been hacked or Facebook had taken it down since I got a naughty naughty warning a few weeks ago. I know you want to know what the warning was for, so do I. They don't really tell you. You just get a warning that you've been naughty and they are taking down your post but they don't tell you what post or when or what the complaint was. So I don't have any idea. 

I'm not the only one getting naughty naughty warnings right now. I guess they've been training a new AI to handle all of the complaints and then letting it run wild. So things that you posted years ago might get tagged now. Or complaints someone made about you ages ago that they hadn't ever gotten to are being looked at and if you used words like dead, or shoot, or punch you in the fucking face, you can get in trouble. 

Someone got a warning for posting a line from The Princess Bride in a thread on a post in a Princess Bride group. 

It's not a great system when you take everything out of the hands of people. 

Which it wasn't a great system when there were people involved either. 

Not just because of the things they deemed fine (scammers and hate speech) but because there were people who were having to look at the worst images to see if they violated terms and conditions. Imagine your entire day is spent looking at death, dismemberment and child porn. That's not healthy.

So the systems don't really work for what they need to do. 

We should all probably stop using it. 

But this morning when a forced stop happened a lot of people discovered how anxious they became when they couldn't access their feeds anymore. What a way to discover you're codependent with an app. 

I didn't get to the point of being actually worried. Once I figured out it was systemwide I just read a book and then got on with my day. But in those moments before I figured it out I did wonder about what it would mean if I lost access to my account. And I really do need to get those photos off. Find the program that downloads Facebook albums again and just do it. I know I've already lost a few because of Facebook dumping things, but I don't want to lose the rest.

I also thought, hunh, if it's crashed hard, like days without being able to log in maybe that would be the break I need to actually stop using it. 

But then it came back up and now I can go back to ignoring that voice...

I do really need to download those photos though.