For a desperate and difficult period of at least eight hours, Facebook and Instagram suffered a massive outage. They’ve so far kept a stony silence on the reasons. And wild uninformed speculation loves a vacuum. Here are 10 definitely true theories.

1.

Facebook have confirmed on Twitter that they have not gone down because of a DDOS (Dedicated Denial of Service) attack. But they have explicitly not ruled out other types of hacks and attacks – many of them far more sophisticated. Could there be someone right now walking around inside the computers at Facebook HQ?

2.

Facebook’s data deals are currently under criminal investigation in the USA, so to rally popular support, they’ve taken their services down. The message to every business that exists thanks to the grace of Facebook is clear – you need us. They’ll soon release a communication, addressed directly to President Trump, that the people will rise up if Facebook isn’t given amnesty.

3.

Further to the above theory, this is in fact a cover for a deep state coup taking place. Now’s the perfect time, when everyone is distracted by their biggest distraction being unable to distract them. Furthermore, police services around the world have been pleading with people to stop calling them to complain about both Facebook and Instagram being down. Now, if you were smart enough to carry out a deep state coup, wouldn’t you also want to keep the cops busy for long enough to get it done? 

4.

Your racist uncle just posted too many boomer memes, and they were too epic for the servers to handle. He’s promised to stop if you come round for dinner, denounce the capital gains tax, and finally admit there were pre-Māori civilisations in New Zealand.  

5.

Russian hackers. Earlier this year Facebook announced a crackdown on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour from Russia”. This is clearly Moscow’s way of saying back,: пошёл на хуй, we’ll give you coordinated inauthentic behaviour Zuckman. 

6.

The Winklevoss twins, and that guy who Justin Timberlake played in the movie, have finally secured their revenge. They obviously used a karmic blockchain.

7.

Feminists. Immediately following the release of new women-based Spinoff webseries On the Rag on to the Google-owned site YouTube, Google broke. Immediately following the release of the women-based On the Rag on to Facebook, Facebook broke. No such breakages of massive internet platforms have ever occurred when the Spinoff has published ordinary non-woman-obsessed webseries.

8.

Facebook is a hotbed of stats nerd and mathematicians, and who’s to say there isn’t a resistance within? Think about it: the outage fell on 3/14/19, aka Pi Day, the closest day in the calendar to π. (“Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to recite the infinite digits of Pi, talk to their friends about math, and to eat Pie.”)

9.

QAnon did this / QAnon couldn’t stop this (delete as applicable) The key point though is that QAnon is definitely involved. We were told to expect ‘The Storm’. Well, here it is. 

10.

Like, technical difficulties or something? Did someone unplug the wrong cord? We don’t know, we’re not scientists or Sue Nicholson or anything like that. Turn it bloody back on.