Might a reasonable explanation for the 6hour service disruption that occurred last week in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp be found in the ‘eureka moment’ of 20th   Century Studios Free Guy movie featuring Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howery, Joe Keery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Taika Waititi and others?

Facebook said in a blog last week that “We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.”

Now consider the following conversation from the eureka moment of the movie which occurred between Millie (Jodie Comer) and Kees (Joe Kerry) from 48:56 to 50:36. See if you can identify what ‘changed’ in the original code written by Keys and Millie. And bear in mind that Facebook says the outage came from a “faulty configuration change.”

Millie: What?

Kees: You were right, you were right Millie: Oh, come on in

Kees: Our code, it is in Free City, and Millie, it works Millies: Yeah, I know. But we don’t have proof

Keys: Just forget about that for one second. I’m saying that our game, Life Itself, where characters would grow and change and feel real

Millie: Yeah

Keys: …Worked. The AI (artificial intelligence) worked. It’s the reason why Free City is so realistic and people love it so much. And of course, it doesn’t look the same. There’s no

waterfalls, there’s no butterflies and unicorns, all the characters have different skins. Of course, they do. But the underlying code is the same. Our code. And Guy, I mean, he has evolved way further than we thought was even possible.

Millie: Wait, are you talking about the hacker in the NPC skin? Keys: Millie I’m talking about the fact that Blue Shirt Guy… Millie: Yeah?

Keys: Is not a player. He is an algorithm who thinks he’s alive. I mean, hell, technically, he is alive. He is the first real artificial intelligence

Millie: (Exclaims) No! No Keys: I know

Millie: No, no, no

Keys: Yeah: yeah, yeah, yeah Millie: Guy? My Guy?

Keys: Guy

Millie: One who has been- Keys: Your Guy?

Millie: Holy-

Keys: This is a good thing Millie: No, it’s really bad

Keys: Millie, his code, it’s thousands of times the size it should be. We did it, Mills. We did it. Everything we wanted to create, it actually happened. Okay? Did you know that the NPCs have private lives? One of the baristas learned how to make a cappuccino through trial and error. I

mean that’s really difficult. I can’t even do that. I can’t even froth my own oak milk in the

morning. And the bombshell character in the game wrote a memoir that’s a searing indictment of gender roles, the patriarchy, it’s a little preachy in parts but overall, it’s pretty good. Millie, we have to celebrate…