Woman Decides to Find Her Long Lost Best Friend Online. The Internet Came Together to Reunite Them

The power of social media has helped people track down old friends, find love and even launch political movements, although it has also received criticism when things backfired. But for those trying to reconnect with long-lost best friends, social media gives them a unique opportunity to bridge the gaps created by physical distance. That is how Brianna Cry and Heidi Tran rediscovered each other once again after a decade after meeting for the first time in 2006.

In 2018, a 19-year-old Cry came across an old photograph of a friend she had met on a dinner cruise in Hawaii as a kid. She wondered if she can ever meet her best friend ever again and that's when she decided to turn to social media to find Tran. "Hey twitter, I met this girl on a dinner cruise in Hawaii in 2006. We were basically bestfriends for that night so I need y’all to help me find my bestfriend cause I miss her and I need to see how she’s doing now. Please retweet this so we can be reunited," she wrote on her X handle @briannacry and shared her old photograph alongside.

Cry, who is now a physical therapist, did not share the post with much hope but she was pleasantly surprised when her post went viral, stacking up more than 98,000 retweets in just a few hours. After a few hours, Tran herself stumbled upon the post where she responded with another picture of herself from the cruise. “Heard you were looking for me,” a then 18-year-old Tran wrote in the reply to Cry's post. The internet was thoroughly invested in the reunion story of Cry and Tran at that point and the friends even landed themselves an interview with Teen Vogue. “We messaged each other and caught up on life,” Cry told Teen Vogue of their online reunion.

“I thought, Let’s see if Twitter can find her for me,” Cry added, recalling that she was just seven years old when she met her friend on vacation. “I don’t think there were many kids our age on this particular dinner cruise, so we found each other and stuck together the whole time.” Since they both attended schools in opposite sides of the country, they couldn't meet each other for a while and relief on social media and FaceTime interactions. “The moment has given me the opportunity to talk with a lot of people and reconnect with some old friends. I’m eternally grateful for that," Tran told the outlet.

Luckily for them, the new captured the attention of TV host Ellen DeGeneres who decided to help the childhood friends reconnect in person. The duo were invited on The Ellen Show in 2019 where the world witnessed their sweet reunion. “We had a great time for this one night,” Cry told DeGeneres during her appearance on the talk show. “I posted on Twitter, and I said, ‘Guys, please retweet this, help me find her so I can see what she’s doing now and what’s going on.'" On The Ellen Show, Cry and Tran took yet another picture together after a long time so they can add it to their scrapbooks as the audience cheered for them.