What Good Is Clout in an Instagram Outage? – Rolling Stone

Parenting blogger and former Bachelor contestant Bekah Martinez takes most Sundays off of Instagram to spend time at her California home with her husband and two children. When Monday arrives, though, she’s ready to start the week. “Usually we have our nanny Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays so that I can tackle email, work on content for brands, sharing my day with followers and all of that because that can really boost engagement,” she says. But this week was different. “I’m usually ready to go at 9 a.m. and right at 9 I was like OK, this is interesting. The app is not refreshing. I can’t post anything, I can’t share anything.” Across the country on the campus of Columbia University in New York, activist and influencer Deja Foxx was also encountering issues when she went to post a snippet of a speaking event she’d participated in with reproductive justice advocate Loretta Ross. “I was like, oh, my Instagram must be down,” she says. But it wasn’t just her. On Monday, Facebook and two of the company’s apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, were inaccessible to billions of users for roughly six hours. Some celebrated a temporary reprieve from our collective social media…
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