Photo From NASA, Not Facebook
The Claim
A photo shows a Facebook team celebrating after they were back online after the global outage.
News posted on
Emerging story
Accounts and pages on social media have recently circulated a photo they claimed of Facebook’s team celebrating that services are restored following a sudden outage of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger on Monday, Oct. 04, 2021.
Photo Description: The two photos above allegedly show Facebook’s team celebrating that services are back online.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar investigated the claim and found it misleading. The photo above has nothing to do with Facebook’s service outage; it was taken on Aug. 05, 2012, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The photo was taken when NASA’s team was celebrating the Curiosity rover’s successful landing on Mars.
The claim has spread once Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger started working again following the sudden outage last Monday. The services’ downtime lasted about seven hours, which prompted the U.S. Department of Defense to state that it is probing possible security threats that may have caused the services’ global outage.
Translated by: Ahmed N. A. Almassri
