On the 4th of October of 2021 the world got shocked by a global outage of one of the most famous social media platforms in the world, Facebook. Facebook has recorded 2.8 billion monthly active users around the world. Its power is such nowadays that some countries, such as North Korea and China, have banned its use to their residents. However, Facebook is not just a simple social media platform that operates on its own. Facebook has acquired in the past other famous social media or networking apps, such as Instagram and Whatsapp, which have a total amount of 1.386 billion and 1.6 billion users respectively. Facebook has not only acquired platforms though, but it has also managed to develop platforms on its own such as Messenger and Oculus, which have become popular worldwide.
During the afternoon of the 4th of October of 2021 (CET), Facebook began displaying some error messages to users in some parts of the world. That could also be perceived as a normal degradation since it has happened in the past again but in a matter of minutes Facebook would look into it and the problem would be totally restored in a relevantly small amount of time.What happened the evening mentioned above though can be considered extremely odd since it seemed that Facebook, and its family of apps, such as Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus, stopped working for good for more than 5 hours. For some users, who may not use Facebook extensively, an outage for some hours may not seem like a big deal, but for some others or even for some businesses that heavily depend their work on such platforms it may have caused severe damage. What is interesting to see is what could cause such an outage and what are the implications of this when it happens to one of the biggest companies in the world.
After the operation of the apps was restored and everything was back to normal, Facebook apologized publicly about the big technical problem and its implications that had to several users and businesses. The company also admitted that the cause of such an outage were defects due to changes that happened to its internet infrastructure, which causes data to flow among its data centers. The defects caused a stop in communications between the data centers, thus resulting in a “halt of services”, as Facebook stated. The problem was so big that even internal systems crashed and stopped working, resulting in employees of the company having trouble even communicating with other colleagues in order to solve the problem more efficiently. Eventually, workers did not even have access to the server areas due to security systems not working.
A big portion of people use Facebook and all of their family apps, as the main tools to communicate with their friends or family, entertain themselves or get updated for news around the world. In some countries, using Facebook has become equivalent to using the Internet. Facebook is also used by a lot of people as the only way to log-in to different apps that they use daily. All of these capabilities were lost for an amount of time.
Apart from people using it for recreational purposes though, apps such as Facebook or Instagram have been the key operating point for a lot of businesses. Many companies use these platforms in order to reach their customers and sell their products. Other companies, such as the advertising ones, rely their core processes on offering advertisements only through social media. Smaller companies also usually take orders online through social media. Even professions that may not sound as usual as others, such as professional gamers and streamers use the platforms as main source for their revenue and at that time they were not able to do anything. As it is normal, businesses recorded medium to massive losses while all the aforementioned apps were down and out of operation.
In conclusion, an approximate outage of 5 hours led to revealing the huge impacts that there might be when people rely extensively on certain apps. People that have as a habit to scroll through the apps or businesses that operate mainly through the same apps may end up having huge implications if a bigger outage occurs. Is it time for people to reconsider if they should rely their everyday lives or work on such platforms and rethink if there are other ways to operate more efficiently in the future? I would appreciate it if you let me know what your views on this topic are in the comments section!
References
Nytimes.com. 2021. Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook. [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-down.html> [Accessed 5 October 2021].
Research, C., 2021. Facebook Fast Facts. [online] CNN. Available at: <https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/11/world/facebook-fast-facts/index.html> [Accessed 5 October 2021].
Backlinko. 2021. How Many People Use Instagram? 95+ User Statistics (2021). [online] Available at: <https://backlinko.com/instagram-users> [Accessed 5 October 2021].
Thank you, Georgios, for this article. It was quite a shock for me personally. Not because I could not get in contact with friends or family, but mostly due to the realisation of being so dependent on one major company. Also, I found out that I often cycle through these three apps, much more often than I was aware of. It made me realise that those platforms may have become a bigger part of my life than I would prefer.
Apart from that, I think this server outage has made people realise that they should not place their bets on the same horse. According to an article (see link down below), competitive platforms like Telegram and Signal have had a huge increase in users since the outage. This may have been a temporary solution for many, but it could also be the start of a more decentralised use of social media platforms. I will make sure I have at least one back up platform for whenever such thing happens again. I hope more people do the same, as platforms become more valuable with more users.
https://punchng.com/facebook-outage-how-telegram-became-fifth-most-downloaded-app-from-56th-report/
Very relevant article Georgios! I particularly liked that you focused your article on how it could have affected businessess and people who rely on it for income rather than the indivudal user who uses it for entertainment! In terms of your question, I agree that an over reliance on connected apps is something we should be aware and maybe even wary of. As this event showed us, FB, Instagram and Whatsapp are connected, and this makes you think about how much data they can collect on us and how dependent we have become of these apps. However I am unsure how we could operate more efficiently in the future, after all have we not all gone straight back to using our apps?
Hi George, great post. I’ve always wondered what the impacts of servers from big companies like Facebook going down would be. I think a lot of people underestimate how many depend on Facebook (also through daughter companies) for work, contact and entertainment. You might have heard about ‘The Big One’, an earthquake scientists say will soon be one of the greatest to be ever recorded. Silicon Valley will be right on the line of the plates, so what will happen if the Big One hits? I hope Facebook is prepared.
Hi Georgios, interesting and most of all very relevant article! It is strange to see that the impact on the world is this big and, moreover, one company basically controls the lives of so many people. To add to your blog, I read a post today on a Dutch news site where they stated that a server failure of Facebook leads to basically no internet in the south-east of Asia. So many people living in that region are depending on the services of the company.
Hi! I really liked your article! I find it very interesting that the outage of Facebook (and similar tech companies) immediately impacts the stock of that company. Facebook saw the biggest drop in their share this year already (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/facebook-shares-suffer-worst-drop-this-year-as-tech-losses-mount). However, we usually see that the stockmarket picks up again relatively quickly and returns to a similar level. This time, we can indeed see an increase of the stock price when the outage is solved, however it is definitely not back to the same level right now (source: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZWNvc2lhLm9yZy8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEP82RKsMUQ0QRnfs9y_Cv3dbSJFI632W_aKSxR5Finwuc8_RQMn20xIDD1fAXFtjmFAZfYRji9y4lmQtNonrGnBodxruFhzCXfG7DoAi3kR8jXAf4SaLVtKoFTm3qJlt0AUK-SR3ArMjmCTwyzBDh7f5omZBNu9DqBJyvtK02Kp). Of course, saying something about this can be premature, but I am just wondering to what extent these outages will affect the stock price of tech companies, such as Facebook, in the long run. And if it will affect the stock prices, what these companies will do to prevent these kind of outages even further?