Wreck-It Ralph Apologizes for Breaking Facebook and Instagram

Social media users spent most of Tuesday morning in a frenzy, as both Facebook and Instagram suffered significant outages around the world. While it’s easy to blame the ever-changing landscape of the Internet, or the sketchy business operations of Mark Zuckerberg’s online empire, it appears as though someone very unexpected is taking the fall for this one.

Wreck-It Ralph is preparing to “break the Internet” in Disney’s new movie this week, but it looks like he made a pit stop to take down the social media sites. The official Twitter account for Ralph Breaks the Internet took to the only working social media forum on Tuesday to claim responsibility for the outages.

“Sorry about that,” Ralph wrote in the tweet, which features a picture of John C. Reilly’s titular character looking incredibly guilty. An arrow cursor points directly at Ralph while the search bar above him asks, “Who broke Facebook & Instagram?”

Of course, this is all a marketing joke to get in on the trending social topics online. The new movie is centered around Ralph actually breaking the Internet, as the name indicates. This will be a huge departure from the first Wreck-It Ralph, which all took place in a simple arcade.

The jump from old school gaming to the expanse of the web is certainly daunting, but directors Rich Moore and Phil Johnston were confident that it was the right move for the sequel.

“Themes have changed, that’s always been at the front of our mind,” Johnston told ComicBook.com. “And Ralph being a guy who has a life that he really likes, so the idea that something would come in and invade his world that would force a change really. That ends up being the steering wheel breaking but the actual change in the Internet. And it’s constantly changing and constantly evolving, and for a guy like Ralph who is more of a sort of homebody if you will. Something like that would create a ton of conflict beyond being a big expansive universe.

“It’s a good place to send a guy like that, because comedies are about conflict and there’s a lot of that in the Internet that Ralph is going to bump up against. That was really the why, why the Internet, because it’s the worst possible place for Ralph.”

“We wanted to drive some sort of wedge between Ralph and Vanellope, like Phil was saying that he’s so comfortable at the beginning and so happy that we love to torture our characters. You know? It just feels like it was the perfect bad place to send him,” added Moore. “Putting him in this situation where he has to go there if he wants to maintain what he’s got there back at home. It just felt like we had found the right thing.”

Ralph Breaks the Internet opens in theaters on Wednesday, November 21st.