While You Were Offline: Sarah Palin Delivers a Mildly Coherent Endorsement

It's the end of the world as we know it—or at least plenty of people are seeing things that way, thanks to winter storms and political endorsements and whatnot. But neither snow nor unexpected rap nor feline Sith Lords could dampen the enthusiasm of the online masses over the last seven days (though Twitter crapping out for a few hours certainly made it seem otherwise). Here, as ever, are the highlights of what you might not have noticed over the past week on the world wide web.

What Happened: Social-media junkies saw their lives flash before their eyes when Twitter stopped working Tuesday.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, Blogs, Media Think Pieces

What Really Happened: Bad news for Twitter junkies Tuesday, when the system went down without warning; users on web and mobile kept receiving warnings that the service was "over capacity" and dealing with an "internal error." The intermittent outage lasted a little over six hours, and managed to capture the attention of the media.

Impressively, even though Twitter had six hours of not working right, the subject nonetheless became a hot topic on Twitter with the hashtag #Twitterdown:

The fact that #TwitterDown trended while Twitter was… well, down, also impressed people:

Twitter: Down but never out, apparently. (And, no, that wasn't a challenge to Twitter to see if they can bring down the service entirely. Please don't.)

The Takeaway: Well, at least Peach was still up for all the iOS people. And there's Facebook and… Ello…? Right? I mean, probably…? (Is Ello still a thing these days?)

What Happened: The East Coast prepared for something that as quickly called #snowmaggedon2016 by freaking out online, as is only appropriate.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, Blogs, Media Think Pieces

What Really Happened: Maybe you haven't heard, but it's kind of snowy on the East Coast of the U.S. right now.

The storm—officially called Winter Storm Jonas—had been expected for days before it eventually arrived, with the Internet enjoying some suitably sensationalist pre-coverage while it was en route. (But what else should be expected from something that was teased as "very much the real deal"?) It was a storm that affected the markets! It was a storm that could be seen from space!

It was also a storm that was felt on Twitter, and how. There were shopping updates!

There were people playing it, ahem, cool.

There were those looking on the upside of things for small businesses!

And there were those prepared to enjoy themselves, no matter what!

But let's not forget the two men with most to lose if things turned truly ugly:

The Takeaway: It only makes sense that so much of #Snowmaggeddon2016 would play out online: what else are people going to do when they're stuck inside, if not mess around on the Internet? Besides, apparently, eat lots of bread and drink lots of milk. Well, at least the groceries probably had a good week…

What Happened: As if Emo Kylo Ren wasn't enough proof that Adam Driver exists to be a living meme, the Internet discovered a cat that looked just like the actor this week, with entirely expected results.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, Blogs, Media Think Pieces

What Really Happened: A reminder that, sometimes, it's the simplest thing that can thrill, entertain and obsess people came this week in the form of a cat that looked like actor Adam Driver.

It was the tweet that caused an avalanche of excitable reports. Like, many, many reports.

It helped that the cat in question, Corey, was a cat being offered for adoption by Monmouth County SPCA, because who can resist shelter animals? Not XO Vain editor Emily McCombs, who adopted Corey, renamed him Kylo Ren (because of course) and wrote about her experience for the Internet.

A story with a happy ending, and a message to other rescue animals hoping to be adopted: It's time to up your celebrity impersonation game.

The Takeaway: If this means that someone is about to announce that they've discovered Puppy Oscar Isaac, Goldfish Daisy Ridley and Parrot John Boyega, I am all in.

What Happened: Sarah Palin returned to the political arena with an endorsement speech that reminded us all why we [insert your ideologically fueled emotion here] her so much in the first place.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, Blogs, Media Think Pieces

What Really Happened: It finally happened; the utter weirdness of the current Presidential nominee race leveled up this week with the reintroduction of a familiar face: Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump, and the Internet exploded with… something that might have been joy? It's really not that clear yet.

Sites struggled to understand Palin's endorsement speech, while others considered it worthy of translation, or some kind of amazing freestyle rap:

(A fun subset of the Twitter responses to Palin's speech were tying it to last year's famed Iggy Azalea fake-subtitled freestyle:

Iggy, the world clearly wants to see this new direction from you.)

It was, nonetheless, a moment that made the Internet take notice, whether it was for snide comments—

—pop culture references—

—or abject glee:

Amazingly, no one seems to be happy about the pairing, beyond Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. Right wing pundits have complained and even Palin's own fans on Facebook aren't on board. Does no-one have anything positive to say? Well, besides Rush Limbaugh, of course.

The Takeaway: Of course, while everyone's busy paying attention to this, few are noticing that Bernie Sanders is trying to start a Simon & Garfunkel revival. Bernie, if it's not "The Only Living Boy In New York," we're not interested.

What Happened: If the world's worst con artists want to take solace in their least successful sting ever, they can at least be glad that they became a social media phenomenon.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter

What Really Happened: We already told you about Dave Holmes' amazing Twitter story about a failed con attempt by some enterprising fake IRS agents. Unsurprisingly, that quickly became the hottest thing on Twitter Thursday afternoon, with a legion of Twitter users redirecting their followers to check out the story:

As the story started to crossover into the mainstream, Holmes reshared the story on Esquire with an exclusive, underwhelming postscript: "I went to Bank of America with the account and routing numbers, and they wrote them down and said 'thank you' and that was pretty much that," he wrote. "I asked if I could go into the back office and watch them report it, and they said 'No,' and I said, 'Yeah, no, that makes sense.'"

True Detective season 3, ladies and gentlemen.

The Takeaway: It's hard to work out which is more likely: whether this story going viral will prevent similar attempts at conning gullible people out of money, or give people bad ideas on how to get rich quick. (Spoiler: there is no way to get rich quick.) Either way, maybe just don't answer any calls from unknown numbers for the next few days, just in case.