As millions of people in the Northeast hunkered down ahead of a storm that battered coastal New England with heavy snow on Monday and Tuesday, they headed to social media to pass the time -- until multiple sites suffered outages, spawning jokes about the horrors of life without Facebook.
Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram were both down early Tuesday between about 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. ET, affecting users in the United States, Asia, Australia and Europe. Some users also reported that dating site Tinder, AOL Instant Messenger and chat service Hipchat had been offline or severely slowed down.
"This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems," a Facebook spokeswoman told NBC News via email. "We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone."
What to do when social-media services go down? Complain or joke about it on the sites that are working, of course. The hashtag #ThingsIDidWhenFacebookWasDown was a trending topic on Twitter, with users tweeting about the shock of living life offline, and the tribulations of actually speaking to other humans:
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