Redwood City, CALIFORNIA—Facebook had to urgently invest $600 million for extra servers to handle the "thoughts & prayers" traffic tsunami from David Bowie fans, in the hours shortly after the singer's death on Sunday.
On 10 January, 2016, English musician David Bowie passed away after an 18-month battle with liver cancer.
Fans of the influential singer immediately took to social media platforms to express their grief with an outpouring of "thoughts & prayers" for Mr Bowie, his family, and friends.
The overwhelming amount of status updates and tweets quickly overloaded both Facebook and Twitter's servers, while MySpace remained completely
It was reported that, for a few minutes, Facebook's servers went down—the first recorded traffic-related malfunction since the site became available for public use in 2006.
An inside source indicated that, during the outage, over 9 million selfies and 6.4 million food Instagram photos were corrupted or lost in upload.
Silicon Valley dubbed the disaster "Blackout Sunday", as the most damaging unintentional cyberattack in computer history.
Furthermore, the downtime caused widespread panic among users, especially those of Generation Y, who were now unable to access their Facebook newsfeed: their primary source of 9GAG memes.
The server crash prompted Facebook technicians to execute an emergency backup hosting protocol, wiping 12 million terabytes (TBs) of selfies (98% of which were submitted by female users) and 16,000 TB of amateur wedding photos off the main data center to make room for the influx of tributes for Mr Bowie.
While many called the singer's death a "tragedy" and others condemned it as a "heinous and cowardly act", there was a minority who were overjoyed at the artist's passing.
Pope Francis of Assisi thanked God for Mr Bowie's death, saying: "Surely David Bowie's passing is a divine miracle, as his death has caused many unbelievers to pray to our Heavenly Father for the first time. I hope they encounter Jesus. Praise the LORD."
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