'Facebook shutdown' rumors circulate, cause social networking panic

It's hard to understand why anyone would believe this sort of story, but it's happened (again). The Internet has gone wild as people tried to search for information on Facebook's "impending closure" after The World Weekly News, a satirical website, posted a fake story that claim Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was closing the site due to "stress."

The article, titled "FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th!" possibly should have been titled "The Social Networking World Will End on March 15th!" as folks suddenly started flooding Google Search with "Is Facebook really shutting down?," "Facebook ending March 15?," and "Facebook shutdown." The tremors echoing across the Web still hadn't settled by Sunday morning.

Twitter was hit with Tweets about the issue, with one person not all that unhappy if in terms of the rumor that Facebook was ending on March 15. Instead, he was more concerned that Facebook users would jump to Twitter:

So the rumor is Facebook is shutting down....please don't jump to twitter & ruin my social networking experience.

It's hard to understand why anyone would believe a company recently valued at $50 billion would shut down. If Zuckerberg was that stressed, he would probably take a leave-of-absence or simply step down.

According to the article, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference and said:

“Facebook has gotten out of control, and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness.”

Even more humorous is the WWN's reported reaction of a high school student and a parent. These are precisely the sorts of reaction we might truly see if Facebook truly was ending on March 15:

“What am I going to do without Facebook?” said Denise Bradshaw, a high school student from Indiana. “My life revolves around it. I’m on Facebook at least 10 hours a day. Now what am I going to do with all that free time?”

“I’m glad the Facebook nightmare is over,” said Jon Guttari, a single parent from Detroit. “Now my teenager’s face won’t be glued to a computer screen all day. Maybe I can even have a conversation with her.”

Considering how the Internet reacts if Facebook, Twitter, or some other social networking site is down for a short down due to an outage, the reaction to the virally spread faux news is not surprising. But users can calm down: the answer to the question "Is Facebook really shutting down?" is "No, get real."