It was certainly seen as a huge defeat - most of Rome's allies did abandon them afterwards and had to be beaten back into submission over the next few years - but whether it was a massacre (at least of Romans) on the scale alleged in the sources is another question.
I mean, Rome was back up and running very quickly afterwards, none of the surviving officers (especially Varro who the sources uniformly blame for the disaster) were punished at the time, and although its nowhere like as serious as it would be now to re-equip forces after a loss on the scale described would have been a huge undertaking even for a state as militarized as the Roman Republic was. Then there is the army that Scipio took to Africa later - which was composed of survivors of Cannae being punished (and other battles), which presumably were not the 10000 or so who broke through the Carthaginian lines with Scipio.
I also think there is a good comparison to be made between the relative lack of social impact after the apparent death of such a significant proportion of Rome's manpower with the rather greater social impact of deaths from Arausio and other defeats in that war - which led to massive changes in the short term (by Marius) and then decades of civil strife culminating in the fall of the republic itself.
The loss of one of the two consular armies is more likely I think, with many of the "lost" army being captured rather than killed (and then released in ignominy and exiled to Sicily, where Scipio found them).