And the ability to use the smart card door lock on the front door to the building that contains the servers that control the system that sends the follow-up message. And the ability to log-in to the system that would send the follow-up message. Hern continued: 'So when its servers were booted off the internet, it also booted off the ability to send that follow-up message. Things still break, it takes a while for the message to spread to all corners of the internet, egg on face, but liveable,' he added, 'But Facebook runs EVERYTHING through Facebook.' you just send another update saying 'oh, don't worry, we have servers, they're here, xoxo'. 'Normally, this would be quite easy to fix. 'Facebook (accidentally, we assume) sent an update to a deep-level routing protocol on the internet that said, basically, 'hey we don't have any servers any more xoxo',' he tweeted. In a series of tweets Alex Hern, UK Technology Editor at the Guardian, simplified the social giant's outage for us non-tech people. But, with the internet collectively losing their minds over the drama, one tech expert came to our rescue and gave us all the answer we were looking for. Unsurprisingly, the answer to that question is very techy – and also hard to pinpoint, given that Facebook is notoriously tightlipped about anything and everything that goes on at their HQ.

With the three main social players off-grid, many people took to Twitter and TikTok to fill the gaping social media hole in their lives, and to ask the question on everyone's lips: 'What is going on?' The messaging platform Whatsapp was also affected by the outage, meaning our group chats went silent for the first time in, well, forever. Yep, in fact the whole world lost the ability to deep dive on Instagram on 4 October after Facebook suffered a major outage. If, like us, you spent all of yesterday looking forward to an evening scroll on socials, but instead found yourself wondering what the heck do with yourself, you're not alone.

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