The Morning Briefing: Sadly, the Great Facebook Outage of 2021 Was Only Temporary

Stephen Kruiser | 4:35 AM on October 05, 2021

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. That fedora isn’t having the effect that you think it is.

One never knows what surprises will be encountered when a new week kicks off. Will it be good news or will it be bad? Will it be a boring Monday that never seems to end? Maybe we’ll get lucky and the Sweet Meteor of Death will finally deliver us from this madness.

A guy can dream.

By the time I rolled around to the news yesterday, all the good stuff had been happening for a while already. I’m on an odd schedule. People in the Eastern time zone are usually halfway through an afternoon of hating their lives by the time I get to my desk.

The “good stuff” that I mentioned was the fact that social media Death Star Facebook was having a rough go of it to begin the first full week of October this year.

Paula kept us up to date on the story all day:

As of publishing time, Facebook has been down for several hours, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus VR. But that’s just the beginning. The social media behemoth’s stock prices also crashed on Monday, making the company’s already bad day even worse. The plummet in stock prices came as a Facebook executive was on CNBC defending the company against claims by a whistleblower that the company prioritized profit over the safety of young Facebook users.

Oh, and speaking of that Facebook whistleblower—who leaked a bunch of documents to the Wall Street Journal a while back—she unmasked herself on “60 Minutes” last night.

THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING THROUGHOUT THE LAND.

Just not on Facebook.

It’s no secret that we in conservative media have a rather fraught relationship with the social media giant. Our fortunes are still somewhat tied to the behemoth, but as I explained last week, we’re working on ways to combat that. It’s pretty safe to say that I didn’t experience any heartbreak over the tough Monday Zuck and Co. were having.

The timing of the outage coming the morning after the whistleblower’s big coming-out party prompted some conspiratorial speculation:

Strange that hours after a whistleblower calls out Facebook saying they engaged in a “betrayal of democracy” that Facebook and other companies it owns are totally down.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 4, 2021

A year or two ago I might have written it off to coincidence. After last year’s election and eight months of Bidenfest I now have a closet that is full of tinfoil hats. Coincidence is a unicorn that no longer exists.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with Facebook’s curious downtime. The beast began reawakening later on Monday so it could get back to fact-free fact-checking, thought policing, and giving liberals a platform to post their mental breakdowns in real-time, complete with memes.

All is right with this very wrong world again.

Everything Isn’t Awful

Cat burglar in training pic.twitter.com/TUXQHcj0cf

— HUMOROUS ANIMALS (@CUTEFUNNYANIMAL) October 1, 2021

Bee Me

Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook https://t.co/je7FwArw3T

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 4, 2021

The Kruiser Kabana

Kabana Gallery

Ipatiev monastery in the winter night, 1870 #realism #alekseysavrasov pic.twitter.com/wn9ikDiHdo

— THE MONTMARTE (@themontmarte) October 4, 2021

Kabana Tunes

EVERYONE LOVES DOLLY PARTON

Sometimes it’s fun to spend a couple of days practicing not leaving any forensic evidence around.

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PJ Media senior columnist and associate editor Stephen Kruiser is a professional stand-up comic, writer, and recovering political activist who edits and writes PJ's Morning Briefing, aka The Greatest Political Newsletter in America. His latest book, Straight Outta Feelings, is a humorous exploration of how the 2016 election made him enjoy politics more than he ever had before. When not being a reclusive writer, Kruiser has had the honor of entertaining U.S. troops all over the world. Follow on: X, MeWe, GETTR.