Blame it all on the middle-class drug users

We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when Facebook and its various ahellspawn offspring go down for seven hours, the country is sent into a tailspin of misery and confusion.

On Monday, Facebook users could be seen out on the streets of our towns and cities accosting strangers and explaining to them exactly what they had for supper the night before, or showing photographs of themselves with a couple of friends enjoying a night out in a pub in Ruabon. All they wanted, these people, was a thumbs up from those strangers, or a warm hug or a kiss. But many of the people they approached were unfamiliar with the mechanisms Facebook has employed to give succour to the needy and the deranged, and merely looked bewildered and slightly frightened by these advances. God only knows what the mental health implications will be.

Meanwhile, people who had demonstrated on Facebook that they were the country’s foremost experts in European Union law (2016-18), blockchaining (2018-19), virology (2020), epidemiology (early 2021) and energy prices (mid 2021) were now reduced to shouting their maniacal gibberish at passers-by without recourse to memes or gifs or links to little-known American websites run by a man called ‘Bubba’ who stores weedkiller in his basement. For all of these people, it came as a shattering blow to discover that nobody, anywhere, was remotely interested in anything they had to say about anything and just wished to be left alone to go about their day.

Facebook is bad enough, but heaven help us if Twitter is similarly discombobulated by the incompetence of its technicians. At least 100,000 British people will self-immolate, and Owen Jones’s head will explode, while the Labour party will suddenly realise that it does not have the support of 80 per cent of the British over the question as to whether women have cervixes, but a meagre 15 per cent instead, all of them on Twitter.