Facebook, Instagram Go Down and People Notice AI-Generated Captions

A screenshot shows Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips's Facebook account during the outage Facebook

After Facebook and Instagram suffered outages on July 3, photos and videos wouldn’t load.

Some users noticed that the apps began showing what appear to be AI-generated captions of people’s photos.

They have descriptions such as, “Image may contain: 2 people, people sitting, laptop and indoor“ or ”your Profile Photo, Image may contain: 1 person, hat.”

Facebook on July 3 confirmed the outage, saying that photos are affected. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” the company wrote.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, tweeted a similar message.

On Twitter and Downdetector, people are voicing outrage. #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown are the top trending hashtags on the social media site.

“Zuckerberg and his cohorts are not very smart, can’t seem to fix problem in short amount of time. Guess they are struggling,” wrote one person on Downdetector.com.

“Can’t load anything, can’t post an I live in Pennsylvania but u can’t look at anything can’t see any pics nothing can’t even load anything on Instagram either only thing that works is WhatsApp, the whole entire day,” wrote another.

Another person speculated: “July is the month that FB starts charging for pics. If you share one, the shared pic is only half price.”

“Can’t see any pictures. Not uploading it just stops midway!” said another.