Popular Meme-Sharing Platform iFunny Was Down, and Users Were Not Happy
Published June 2 2021, 12:03 p.m. ET
In an internet culture dominated by memes, iFunny has proven to be an essential resource for those that use it regularly. The app and site are famous for the memes that are regularly posted to the platform and often go viral on other sites afterward. On the morning of June 2, though, the platform seemed to be down, and many wondered what had happened to iFunny that led to the outage.
What happened to iFunny?
According to Down Detector, there were many reports of iFunny outages in the early hours of the morning on June 2. Although the platform seems to be working for most people now, it's natural to wonder why the site was down, especially because it remains a popular destination for those looking to share a great meme. As it turns out, the issues were with the site's servers, which is a common reason for a site outage.
Ultimately, it seems that the team behind iFunny worked quickly to restore the outages, and the site is now up and running as usual. Although the outage may have created a minor inconvenience for some users who were hoping to navigate the site, the quick resolution suggests that the platform wasn't dealing with any major issues.
iFunny faced controversy in the past after being infiltrated by the far right.
Although the outage at iFunny has been resolved, the company is still roiling from reports that were first made public in 2019 and suggested that the site's owners had asked volunteer moderators to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) after two of the site's regular users were arrested for allegedly threatening mass violence on the platform.
In speaking with BuzzFeed, one moderator suggested that the NDAs had been introduced to stop moderators from exposing the presence of far-right groups that were posting to iFunny regularly.
“They’re trying to make all of us sign an NDA to shut us up so we can’t expose them again,” the moderator said at the time.
Slack messages that were leaked to BuzzFeed seemed to further reinforce the idea that the company's top leadership didn't take the threat of white supremacy on the platform seriously.
One moderator suggested that leaders were more concerned about keeping the site's user base, which was roughly 10 million monthly users at the time, from waning. They were not concerned about deradicalizing young people who find right wing messages on the platform.
The story of iFunny was one of many cases of a site having to deal with the rise of white supremacy and conspiracy theories across the internet in recent years.
iFunny may be in the news now because of a technical problem, but the site also has to reckon with the bigger issues around radicalization that have been documented on the platform. Although there are no easy answers to the question of content moderation, allowing dangerous ideas to fester online is not acceptable either. In that respect, iFunny is far from the main offender, but the site is a symptom of a larger problem with online discourse.
