Late night hosts joke about how people survived the great Facebook-Instagram outage of 2021

"Today, Facebook and Instagram were hit by a massive outage and stopped working for millions of users," Jimmy Fallon said on Monday's Tonight Show. "Facebook was only down for a day, and in that short time everyone got the vaccine." Yes, he added, "Facebook's entire site crashed. They were like, 'Oh my God, this is the best press we've had in months!' Meanwhile, people who couldn't use Instagram spent the day posting their weekend pumpkin-patch selfies on LinkedIn. "

Yes, "if you wanted to share photos, you had to go door-to-door with Polaroids of your brunch," Stephen Colbert quipped at The Late Show. "For hours, users were left in suspense about whether their second cousin thinks the vaccine gives your pancreas WiFi. It was so bad that the only way Facebook could let the world know what was going on — and this is true — was by posting a message on Twitter. ... That's like Burger King running out of fries and having to announce it on a Big Mac."

"Now, clearly this is the day the machines have risen up and are taking over," Colbert said, "but don't panic: They only know our thoughts, feelings, family, friends, location, facial patterns, and banking data."

Subscribe to The Week

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

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"With no social media, I actually ended up spending most of the day talking to my son — he's really nice," James Corden joked at The Late Late Show. "People started noticing something was wrong this morning when they felt happy for more than 30 minutes." He noted former President Donald Trump's legal push to get back on Twitter, and a British couple who charged guests for wedding cake — by the slice. "In these uncertain times, it's nice to know that two equally obnoxious people have found each other."

"Not even 12 hours after the #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, after that 60 Minutes story last night, Facebook, it seems they may have deleted themselves," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. Seriously, "the first three people who thought of Facebook now hate each other! Before Facebook, I had no problems with any of my aunts or uncles, it was all birthday checks in the mail."

Kimmel found the upside to the CDC's new Christmas guidance, but, he said, "my concern for the holidays is we're gonna find out Santa is an anti-vaxxer. You know he is an old white guy in a red hat, don't be surprised."

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Peter Weber

Peter Weber is a senior editor at TheWeek.com, and has handled the editorial night shift since the website launched in 2008. A graduate of Northwestern University, Peter has worked at Facts on File and The New York Times Magazine. He speaks Spanish and Italian and plays bass and rhythm cello in an Austin rock band. Follow him on Twitter.