Yeah; it sounds like that is maybe the case. Reminds me of the concern around a "dark start" if the power grid goes down where you can't bring up certain power plants because they need power to start.
I do know that many plants which require power to bootstrap themselves maintain emergency generation facilities (with battery backup for the diesel/natural gas engine starters). Hopefully there's a sufficient number of these to make the "dark start" issue not much of a concern.
The big problem with a dark start is bringing the grid back up (syncing frequency, overcoming initial load, calculating the load on specific lines ...). Jumpstarting a few plants is going to be the easy part.
I know that in Ontario, the Bruce Nuclear Plant (with about 8GW capacity) is designed to run indefinitely through a power outage and did during the Northeast blackout in 2003. I assume that sort of power would be enough to bootstrap the grid in Ontario.
I'm guessing Facebook upgraded everything to the highest level tech and inadvertently got thrown back into the stone age.