Yesterday morning Twitter was flooded with tweets of concern and disbelief, but what was it that got everyone in such a state? A global crisis?
No. Facebook and Instagram were down. For an hour…
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide were unable to access Facebook and Instagram for almost an entire hour on Tuesday. With a combined total of 1.5 billion users, both sites appeared with error messages. This verging-on-Apocalyptic event occurred in the United States, Europe and Asia. Tinder, AOL Instant Messenger and Hipchat were all also affected.
Luckily for mankind, Twitter survived, and so the near social catastrophe was avoided. Thank goodness!
Instead of carrying on with daily routines and getting ready for work, social media users lost all sense of priority and rushed to the one lifeline they had left. Twitter quickly became inundated with hashtags #facebookdown and #socialmeltdown2015 immediately trending.
Rumours suggested it was hacker group Lizard Squad, others including Facebook themselves have claimed it was an internal technical glitch that brought the social networks offline. Either way, considering the international reaction, we can’t help but question – are we addicted to social media? And what about our smartphones in general?
Research shows that the majority of social media users access from a mobile device. Last year, on average a massive 1.8 million smartphones were sold per day. To put this in perspective, that is five times as many as there were children born per day. The average smartphone user now spends up to a staggering three hours of their day on a mobile device, and let’s face it, despite our best intentions the majority of this time is not spent contacting our loved ones, or anything seriously important, but scrolling through photos of personalised Starbucks cups and videos gone viral.
This got us talking, and this morning we put our heads together and came up with the worst, and most shameful social media and smartphone habits. (Obviously, none of these apply to us!)
Here are 10 signs that you may have an addiction…
- The first thing you do when you open your eyes in the morning is check your newsfeed, before even saying good morning to your partner.
- You check your weather app for the current temperature instead of opening a window or looking outside.
- Your meal has gone cold while you were busy finding the best filter for your ‘food porn’ photo.
- You have Googled a question rather than asking a friend.
- You’ve been confused when someone has asked you what you got up to on your holiday – ‘haven’t they seen my Facebook album?!’
- You have used the phrase ‘hashtag’ or ‘lol’ in normal conversations. This one is bad.
- You’ve maintained multiple text and Whatsapp conversations even when engaging in a real face-to-face conversation.
- You have walked into a lamppost, human or any other object because you were too engrossed in your phone.
- You have been tempted to sneak off early from a night out because your phone has died, before you have been able to de-tag that unflattering photo.
- You have checked your smartphone whilst reading this post.
Perhaps it is time we put things back into perspective. Let’s not forget what is real. Remember, no photo can look as great the food tastes.
