‘We were quite surprised’: Finland’s embassy goes viral with staff training day post on Instagram

The embassy of Finland in Canberra was temporarily closed on Tuesday, 10 November.

Millions of people across the world were, it turns out, quite upset by this.

A day later, with the flourish of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the embassy reopened its doors – having garnered many millions of views on its videos, spurred memes seen by millions more and social media attention across the globe, all unexpectedly from an innocuous Instagram post about a staff training day.

“We were all having a nice planning day, then someone said ‘oh my goodness it’s gone completely viral’,” Arto Haapea, Finland’s ambassador to Australia, told Guardian Australia.

The Finnish embassy, nestled in leafy Yarralumla in Canberra’s diplomatic zone just a stone’s throw from Parliament House, isn’t exactly a tourist hotspot in the nation’s capital. Flanked by the embassies of Estonia, Singapore, Mexico and Samoa, the sleek building – all grey panelling and glass – looks more like a bank or an office block than the genesis of a bizarre social media sensation stretching from Europe and the United States to the centre of Australian politics.

“The embassy of Finland in Canberra will be temporarily closed on Tuesday, 10 November 2026. Regular hours will resume on Wednesday, 11 November,” @FinlandInAustralia posted on Monday, with text over video of the northern lights glowing an eerie green.

Last week, the embassy’s other Instagram videos were getting like counts in the dozens or low hundreds. The post about the building’s opening hours has, as of time of writing, been liked 622,000 times, shared 405,000 times, and been seen by up to 10 million people worldwide.

How it got picked up by Instagram’s social media algorithm, and supercharged to be seen across the world, is likely something to do with the embassy’s previous video; Haapea promoting a competition to fly single people from around the world to Helsinki for a “Finnish Dinner Date”. The dinner date video also “went a bit viral”, Haapea said, getting 8m views and 163,000 likes.

“We were quite surprised by that,” the ambassador said.

Haapea said his team hadn’t had time to do any deep analysis of why these two clips went unexpectedly viral, but he theorised that the post with the opening hours “happened to ride on the same algorithm” as the dinner date, getting even more views, and attracting influencers, companies and brands around the world to make their own videos.

“POV you’re trying to enter the Embassy of Finland in Canberra but it’s 10th of November,” posted @j.ackdale, knocking on a locked door. That has 604,000 likes on Instagram at the time of writing.

“Me, all the way from Muscat, trying to get answers about the Finnish embassy in Canberra,” posted @sand_and_heels from Oman.

“I’m flying over 300 people from Finland to Australia. Hopefully the Embassy of Finland in Canberra is open today,” posted Finnish pilot @juusojelmer, to 88,000 likes.

That included Finnish politicians and ambassadors around the world, many of whom posted their own jokes, calling their colleagues or reassuring Finns in various countries that their embassies remained open. Haapea said even Finland’s foreign minister was keen to chat.

“We were done with the planning day and did a sauna with the team, and the foreign minister wanted to call about the planning day,” he said, as they filmed a video together – Haapea fresh from the sauna – promising that normal functions of the embassy would resume the next day.

On Wednesday, Canberrans from politicians to radio hosts and journalists visited the embassy, making their own social media clips live from the scene, while ordinary people tried knocking on the door or chatting to Finnish staff. A lighthearted video with a grand reopening, complete with ribbon-cutting ceremony, had to come next, Haapea said.

“We thank the international community for your fascinating interest,” the embassy posted.

As to why the interest in the first place? The ambassador said he’s still not sure.

“I think people are just looking for good news, to take their minds off all the craziness in the world. With the algorithm, and people who are good at making memes, all it took was a few big influencers to make a meme about it,” Haapea said.