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.…