VIDEO: Derry Vox Pop: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp down: Did it affect you?

The social media platforms, which are all owned by Facebook, were unavailable for six hours with Facebook Messenger and Facebook Workplace also being affected.

Facebook released a statement on Tuesday stating: “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.”

Part of the reason it took so long for the issue to be resolved is because the servers that shut down were the same servers that needed to be logged in to in order for the system to be rebooted.

The platforms were all back up late on Monday evening and Facebook are said to have lost around £4.4 billion while the pages were offline.

This isn’t the first time such an issue as happened to Facebook, either. In March 2019 the popular website was down for nearly 14 hours.

The power cut got people to think about how they use social media and which platforms they use. Messaging forums such as Telegram, Signal and Viber saw an upsurge in usage of their own services.

Most people use social media to keep in touch with their friends and families, for business and even to get their news so how did people cope without the three apps on Monday evening?

Did anyone even notice it was gone?

We spoke to the people of Derry to see how this affected them.

Patryk: “I noticed it of course but I’ve so many things to do, I just switched to something else.”

Emma: “I use my business on Instagram so I couldn’t get through to anyone for messages or anything.”

Bronagh: “I noticed but I was doing other stuff so it didn’t really bother me to be honest!”

Michael: “I don’t have Facebook. I do have Whatsapp but I didn’t even notice anything was down. I don’t really check my phone.”

Clodagh: “It was a bit annoying trying to make plans with people but you can just phone them. It wasn’t the end of the world! It was fine. I was at Bennigans open mic so it’s not as if I was glued to my phone anyway. It’s back now so it was just a little temporary glitch. No big deal!”

John: “I didn’t even notice, to be honest.”