After Facebook, Instagram and Threads suffered a highly unusual outage, news outlets and social media users in Bangladesh fell for a post on the platform X that parodied a response to the crisis from Mark Zuckerberg. While the Meta CEO reportedly has an account on X, it had no posts concerning the outage, as of March 19.
Bangladeshi news outlet Bhorer Kagoj quoted the purported social media post from Zuckerberg in an article from March 5 about the Meta outage.
The post says: “Chill guys. Wait few minutes everything will be solved”.
The Asian Age, an English-language news site in Bangladesh, quoted the same post from the account @MarkCrtlC in their report about the outage published the following day.
The post surfaced as Meta’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads experienced an outage on March 5, with users locked out of their accounts.
A screenshot of the tweet was also shared on Facebook here,here and here in Bengali and here and here in English. The tweet was posted by an account called “Mark Zuckerberg (Parody)”.
A keyword search of the account handle @MarkCrtlC on X led to an account which described itself as parody and the user as a “comedian” (archived link).
AFP found the post about the outage published on March 5 (archived link).
AFP has reported that Zuckerberg maintains an X account under the handle “finkd” but he is not a regular user (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison between Zuckerberg’s reported account (left) and the parody account (right):
Zuckerberg has not published anything about the outage on the account, as of March 19.
His last post was published in July 2023, which was months before the outage (archived link).
