Twitter, Is It Down, and tons of other sites were struggling due to the Facebook outage

When something like Facebook drops off the internet, there are massive knock-on effects. For example, a website that’s meant to tell you if services are down, called Is It Down Right Now, struggled mightily under the load of people trying to see Instagram’s status. Cloudflare, a company that runs a DNS service (DNS acts like a map for your web browser when it’s trying to find a website and is also the likely culprit when it comes to major outages), reports that it had to mobilize extra resources to keep up with the traffic of people trying to load Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp) over and over.

If you need to check if other sites are down, you do still have options. There’s the venerable DownDetector, as well as Down for Everyone or...

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