Charles Bachman stands outside the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. He takes long drags off his American Spirit cigarette and paces. Bachman is one of the lead server technicians at the social networking site, and right now he’s trying to calm the fuck down.

“You know how many quiz results we lost to that ‘time-voodoo’ nonsense?” he asks. “There are a fuck-ton of people out there right now who have no idea which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle they most closely resemble!”

Bachman curses to himself and taps his ash into a planter.  The ‘time-voodoo nonsense’ he’s referring to was a devastating crash and reboot of Facebook’s servers that occurred sometime in the early morning hours last Friday. Hard data is scarce, but what Facebook knows is this: the crash was not caused by a hacker, or a power outage, or even faulty programming.

Which means that it had to be the Prince of Persia and his fucking Dagger of Time.

“Look, this ain’t racial or anything — a lot of our tech support guys are from down there,” Bachman says and makes vague gestures to his side.  “But, hey, when Facebook goes back in time thirty minutes, I’m going to blame on the guy with the dagger that controls time! Right?”

The Prince of Persia in question is not the Prince of Persia, but a Prince of Persia. The Prince discovered the Dagger of Time, a weapon that allows its user to manipulate the fabric of the universe how he chooses, while laying siege on the Maharaja of India. Though the Dagger of Time has been used for nefarious purposes countless times (by various evildoers) while its custodian, the Prince has for some reason failed to return the weapon to its proper owner.

So far federal investigators are backing up Bachman and Facebook’s allegations. According to a pieced-together timeline, the Prince of Persia broke up with his girlfriend on July 21st over an undercooked curry dinner. The Prince updated his status on the 23rd to the following: “Gurl, I miss u. I wak up evry day and thnk about us, what we could b. dunt leav babe, lets work it 2gether baby, ill neva let you down babe. Dunt leave!!!11 U need me!!!”

It was liked by 7 people in the first twenty minutes, and received comments such as, “hang in there bro”, “lol” and “stop bein’ a pussy!”

Technicians speculate that the Dagger of Time was employed shortly after. Time was reset to right before he Prince updated the status, but due to the Dagger being created before the dawn of social networking, everybody still remembered.

Technicians like Bachman have been working around the clock since. Hardcasual attempted to call the Prince at his palace, but we must have forgotten to take notes. We know we talked to him because we were charged for a half-hour long distance call to Persia. Weird.

Ronnie Gruen, a charm school colleague of the Prince who reconnected with him last month via Facebook, has a different perspective on events, “Yeah, I told him to stop bein’ a pussy about it. And like, forty seconds after I posted it he was at my front door, his face all red and puffy and shit. Dude totally suckerpunched me. Before I could tear him a new one, he did some faggy dance and disappeared.”

The Prince of Persia’s page has been dormant for the last few days, except for his “Favourite Music” section which has changed from “the sound of her voice” to “everythang ‘cept country.”

[With additional reporting by Filipe Salgado.]