As some of you know, about two months ago I deactivated my Facebook account. I desperately needed a break from all the passive-aggressive posts that cried out for attention yet gave no details (you know, posts like “Well this sucks”), the posts that pleaded with me to “please like and share,” which come across as a desperate cry for validation, and the Foursquare check-ins whose purpose I have yet to understand, but thanks for telling me no one’s at your house for the next two hours. I don’t actually have anything inherent against Facebook, I used it to keep in touch with friends and colleagues from around the world, I just needed a break. Apparently if I log back in everything will come back. I don’t know if I ever will, but never say never.

Anyway, apparently Facebook crashed on Thursday morning for about 30 minutes, making the service unavailable worldwide for millions and millions of users. People began to panic; almost immediately the (sigh) hashtag #WhenFacebookWasDown shot through the roof, and people started posting to rival social media sites such as Twitter and Google+ asking if it was the apocalypse, the rapture, and stating they’d always remember where they were when Facebook died. That, incidentally, led to some hilarious tweets.

Did you see this screen? It’s ok!

As the article states, some pseudo-over-reactionary named John Pudny facetiously lost his mind, tweeting “It’s the end of the world…#Facebook is DOWN!!” I don’t think media reports on that particular tweet, which was widely quoted, picked up on the troll nature of that tweet.

That all happened within 30 MINUTES! It’s not a big deal if a website crashes, people, especially one as massive and non-critical as Facebook. You can go half an hour without it, everyone survived the outage last October when the site went down for hours due to maintenance. It was not a disaster of biblical proportions, there was no human sacrifice, dogs and cats didn’t start living together, but there was plenty of mass hysteria. Now that it’s back up, please like and share this post.