Uniting the world: Squid Game & the Facebook outage
Hi there,
Hope you had a great week!
My week started with a personal binge watching record on Netflix. All thanks to the insanely popular Korean series ‘Squid Game’. It had me hooked like crazy. More about that in a bit.
And then Monday ended with the massive outage at Facebook that also took down Instagram and WhatsApp with it. It might have been distressing for many, but it had a crazy chain reaction on other platforms that were still up, with Twitter hogging the bulk of the limelight. Will elaborate in a bit.
The other major headlines of this week featured two sons — one of a superstar and one of a union minister. I’ll skip them for this week and focus on the two other events that kind of united the world in a strange way.
Here goes…
Squid Game and my personal binge watch record
This is how it started.
I saw a tweet from Netflix about people in red jumpsuits.
Having watched Money Heist, and being familiar with those red jumpsuits, I thought this new Korean series ‘Squid Game’ was some similarly themed copy of the same. I didn’t bother much about it.
I hadn’t even watched the trailer or had any clue as to what this show was about, but on a hunch I started watching it over the weekend.
I went on to watch all the 9 episodes in less than 24 hours.
Each episode was close to an hour. So I almost spent 9 hours of my weekend doing this.
I never binge watched any show like this ever. It’s a new personal record for me. And that record will tell you how highly I think of this show.
I heard that some broadband company in Korea sued Netflix because ‘Squid Game’ was hogging all the bandwidth available. Too many people were watching this show.
I then read that this show is on its way, or probably already is by now — the most watched Netflix series ever. An incredible feat by any stretch of imagination considering the ‘too much content’ and ‘citizens of little bubbles’ world that we live in today.
The internet is flooded with memes from this show. And if you skip the show, you are sure to miss out on one of the most significant pop culture events of our time.
You must have already seen memes with this doll.
It is almost impossible for any event or content to reach such critical mass unless aided by some special forces.
I am not going to speak about that in this digest, but am definitely going to write a detailed blogpost about this show soon.
If you haven’t seen this show yet, make it a part of your weekend schedule.
(Tip: You can watch this show with English dialogues; don’t have to stress yourself to follow the subtitles with Korean dialogues)
More about this show, very soon, on my blog.
Let’s now move on to the other big global event that united us all.
The great Facebook outage and the mega meme fest
This was my first reaction when I heard that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down like a pack of cards…
All these apps belong to Facebook and it is the perfect fodder for some dystopian story where someone hacks into Facebook and takes down all these services.
This Monday gave us a glimpse of it. It showed us how dependent we are on these technologies and platforms, and at such a global scale.
Twitter was the one global platform most people ran to, and it didn’t miss the opportunity to have some fun.
This is what the official Twitter account tweeted:
Then followed a flood of replies from literally every major brand out there. It became a global meme fest. Click the tweet above to view all the replies and the replies to those replies. I am sure you can spend the whole day just scanning through that thread.
I am sharing some here. Starting with WhatsApp itself, maybe not seeing the irony of what was happening.
It received a prompt reply from Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter.
Then the others started.
This one received a cheeky reply…
And here are some more tweets.
Check the reply Yahoo got :)
And the show went on.
For those few hours when the most critical apps for global communication were down, Twitter managed to somehow unite everyone in a hilarious way.
I took the opportunity to plug my newsletter in that moment of crisis :)
So yes; if you are reading this digest as a mail in your inbox, we have a very special bond beyond the confines of a social media platform.
If you are reading this online on a webpage, what are you waiting for — click that subscribe button now.
Signing off for this week
So that’s movies, life, and a lot more for you this week.
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, or should I say compiling it.
Eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback. You can reply to this mail or drop me a note on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Do share this digest with your friends too.
Cheers!!!
Kartik Dayanand Boddapati