What Went Down at Facebook (short story)
What Went Down at Facebook was a standalone satirical short story released as a Twitter thread by Callum Phillpott in 2021, riffing on the then-recent unexplained blackout of social media site Facebook. It was initially unconnected to the Jenny Everywhere mythos but introduced the earliest version of the Man in Grey.
Contents
Plot
After Facebook goes down, Callum Phillpott relates in a Twitter thread that according to a friend of theirs who works there, there have been “odd occurrences” at Facebook HQ for “a while now”. The list of these strange events begins on June 18th, 2019 when an employee sends in “a complaint card about chanting in the server room”, a month before a different employee is fired for bringing a raccoon to work. The chanting is heard again in December, and, at the following Christmas party, Zuckerberg steals yoghurt from the break-room fridge.
When employees return to work on January 7th, they find that seven of their number have gone missing; the next day, they experience a glitch in time as all clocks within the building begin to tick backwards, only to find that the clocks outside match their final state when they're eventually allowed to go home. The chanting resumes on March 3rd; the next day, “Mark Zuckerberg eats all the ham out of an employee’s ham sandwich, leaving behind the bread”, and on March 5th, Room 5B mysteriously disappears from the floor plan. It goes on to be found in January 2021, containing the prone bodies of five of the employees who went missing on January 7th, 2020. At their funeral service, one of the bodies gets up and begins babbling about the Man in Grey; when a living employee asks what the undead one is talking about, “Zuckerberg fires them on the spot”.
On March 3rd, when chanting resumes in the server room, an intern goes to check it out and returns wearing grey robes. The next day, the time-slippage problem from the previous March 4th also repeats, but someone also begins to notice a mysterious black mould growing in the server room, which gains further attention the next day, which also sees “Zuckerberg glumly announc[ing] over the intercom that Chuckzikkiushki has pulled out of funding”. After June 7th's report reads simply “Screaming”, June 8th sees “reports of the server room briefly being replaced by a WW2 supercomputer, before flickering back to the regular server room”, while the black mould continues to get worse; there is also some hubbub about employees feeling like they're “being watched”, although this turns out to have a mundane if disquieting explanation, i.e. that new security cameras had been installed without this being disclosed to them.
On September 16th, “the water in the water cooler takes on the appearance and taste of liquid mercury” and “some employees” swear that they can see a mysterious humanoid figure in the mercury in place of their own reflections. On September 21st, a mysterious mammalian rodent vaguely resembling a raccoon is found in the server room, with Zuckerberg setting his imagineers onto “do[ing] thorough tests on it”. On September 30th, the time-slippage worsens as an entire day repeats, and so does the black mould. Additionally, Mark Zuckerberg is “caught carrying a fridge outside of the building”, an employee “tries to listen to an album, but instead hears a woman saying a series of numbers”, and the chanting in the server room is heard once more.
In the end, however, when Facebook goes down on October 4th, it is because “someone spills a cup of water in the server room, breaking it all for a day”.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- This story takes place in a universe which Callum Phillpott stated on the Jenny Everywhere Discord is “probably a different universe” from the 925th Universe, though PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol established that the events of this story were retroactively subsumed into the 925th Universe Man in Grey's backstory, suggesting echoes of its events must also have become valid history for the 925th Universe.
Continuity
- A reimagined version of the Man in Grey soon debuted in PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There. The prototype Man in Grey referenced in What Went Down at Facebook was later referenced in PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol, which suggested that the later Man in Grey had involuntarily subsumed the backstory of his template.
Behind the scenes
Background
Upon rereleasing the story on Tumblr on July 8th, 2023, Callum Phillpott appended the following comments:
| With Twitter’s state in the air, I thought I should preserve a semi-important part of 925 Universe history. Presenting “What Went Down at Facebook”, a satirical thread about what really caused Facebook to go down on October 4th, 2021… turns out it’s eldritch horrors beyond mortal imagining. The main thing of note here is it’s the earliest published reference to the Man in Grey, a character who’d later become one of the main trio in the 925 Universe series. Whether or not this story is canon to that series is up in the air, but it’s not not canon. |
| —Callum Phillpott |
Read online
What Went Down at Facebook was originally released on Twitter, and could also formerly be downloaded on Tumblr. In addition to having been rereleased more permanently on the official Jenny Over-There website, it is also reproduced here with permission:
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