'It's mayhem over here': The Facebook outage, according to employees

In case you aren't one of the company's billions of users (or are living under a rock), Facebook and its apps Instagram and WhatsApp were all hit Monday by a still-unresolved widespread outage, prompting yet another public relations crisis, plenty of memes, and of course, some Twitter trolling.

The cause of the outage has yet to be determined (at least publicly), but Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer assured users that teams are working "as fast as possible" to restore service. And while the public might be be panicking (or perhaps rejoicing?) without the luxury of the post-dinner Instagram scroll, how are things going for employees hunkered down in the Facebook trenches?

As it seems, not wonderfully. "It's mayhem over here," one employee told The Associated Press' Philip Crowther.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

Employees have said they're having issues making calls from work-issued cellphones and receiving external emails, and are even struggling to use the company's internal communications platform, reports The New York Times. In response, they're turning to other platforms, like LinkedIn, Zoom, and Discord, to do their jobs.

Workers also said they were unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because the outage is also affecting their digital badges. For instance, security engineers reportedly weren't able to assess the problem because they couldn't access the server areas.

While tech outages are not uncommon, "the duration and widespread nature of the disruption for Facebook and all its platforms is unusual," networking expert Tom Daly told The Wall Street Journal. "They have a massive infrastructure with a massive amount of complexity and they have to resolve all of that complexity to recover."

Somehow, though, someone over there is keeping their cool, for better or for worse. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri compared the outage to a "snow day."