On Monday, Facebook experienced the longest and most crippling outage in the social media company’s history as both its main site and sister platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, were completely unusable for hours around the globe. Naturally, the jokes started flying on social media sites that were working, and Stephen Colbert had plenty to say on the topic when Monday’s The Late Show episode aired. While setting up the events surrounding Facebook’s worldwide outage, Colbert couldn’t help but get in a solid dig at the platform’s penchant for spreading wild conspiracy theories.
“For hours, users were left in suspense about whether their second cousin thinks the vaccine gives your pancreas WiFi,” Colbert quipped before reveling in how awkward it must have been for Facebook to communicate its outage to users through a competitor.
“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. Ow! That must hurt,” Colbert said. “Facebook communicating problems on Twitter? That’s like Burger King running out of fries and having to announce it on a Big Mac.”
“As the panic grew, Facebook did not say what might be causing the outage,” the Late Show host continued. “Now, I’m no computer expert, but my theory is: a just God?”
However, Colbert didn’t keep his jokes contained to the outage. He also made it a point to highlight that the outage occurred shortly after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appeared on 60 Minutes and claimed that the social media site has been purposefully allowing misinformation to fester on the site because anger leads to more profitable levels of engagement.
“Well, if the Facebook algorithm likes things that make you angry, it’s gonna love the news about the Facebook algorithm,” Colbert said to close out the segment.