Junior Tom Braslavsky, a Hatchet columnist, looks into students’ dependence on social media and notes that it affects them in more ways than they may believe.

Thursday afternoon, Facebook spread the news that its website was temporarily out of service… through Twitter: “@Facebook: Facebook may be slow or unavailable for some people because of site issues. We’re working to fix this quickly.”

For the next few hours, while the world’s top social networking site experienced its worst outage in four years, some GW students sat at their laptops, staring at the error screen and repeatedly hitting refresh in the hope that their homepages would come back up. Soon enough, some students were falling asleep in class, hitting up other social networks or wondering what to do with all their new free time.