As I am sure you are all aware, Facebook had one of the longest outages it has ever recorded on Monday evening here in Europe, lasting about 6 hours ((Barry, 2021). The outage was worldwide, and affected the normal flow of information as a whole. Despite an estimated $50 billion decrease in market value (Sweney, 2021), the negative impact it had on users worldwide was significantly more important. This has led many people to question whether we as a society are over-dependant on social media applications such as the Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp of the Facebook group.
Different regions in the world attach different importances to “western social medias” such as Facebook. In developing countries, notably in Latin America, where the emergence of internet and smartphones has been close to twofold in the last two years (TechCrunch Is Now a Part of Verizon Media, 2021), social medias are borderline a necessity for the daily functions of locals. Indeed, the free nature of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp means that more people rely on these social networks than on regular sim contracts or sim based communications. In Latin America, 85% of all internet users have a social media account. This only highlights what kind of devastating impact the failure of Facebook can have on local inhabitants.
It has been seen that more developed regions of the world, namely Europe, are less influenced by free social media. As opposed to the aforementioned 85%, only 50% of europeans actively depend on Facebook and its applications for communications (Sweney, 2021).
But as we move further east, there is a trend for a smaller usage of Facebook’s social media platforms. Unexpectedly, Russia reports a mere 8.8% of people using Facebook, as many Russians prefer local alternatives such as OdnoKlassniki (OK.ru). Further East, we can see that the usage pattern of Western social medias is smaller than elsewhere. The biggest economies in Asia, namely China, Japan and South Korea, all have comparatively low usage rates for Facebook despite such a prominent GDP per capita. In China, the Facebook company is totally banned. Nevertheless, less economically developed countries in Asia, such as India, follow the same trend as Latin America as they have abnormally large usage rates for free social medias.
Some have pinned the timing of Facebook’s outage as mitigating, as it occurred during the Indian Night time. For a country with over 500 million Whatsapp users (Sweney, 2021), the impact of this outage could have been significantly more pronounced if it had happened a couple of hours later.
This highlights the fragility that lies on relying solely on social medias for communications. It also underlines how the perspective on over dependency on social medias depends strongly on geographic placement.
Furthermore, this outage has pushed many people to express further concerns on security, as the source of the issue has not been explained in a clear and detailed manner.
REFERENCES
- Barry, E. (2021, October 5). Messenger Apps Signal and Telegram Benefit After Facebook Outage. Time. https://time.com/6104151/signal-downloads-facebook-outage/
- Sweney, M. (2021, October 5). Facebook outage highlights global over-reliance on its services. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-outage-highlights-global-over-reliance-on-its-services
- TechCrunch is now a part of Verizon Media. (2021, September 22). TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/latin-americas-second-wave-of-digital-transformation/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADqC0VgYnPsGg02YWG2uVJZRj6w1KfmshCPtU8Mo7upu0qonam70DxE93UhNwfKAUpHDSaR4RoZ77p3A4v24BqvdYPk_W79haMBOZDJjmO6fRUPtJ6sUcjUAuPu5xoK_BmPm5qjJJ8SKQKR1sMOSEsHvWIOJHz-mjHy2bJQoPif0
Hi Andries! A rigorous article with informative data support. The article discussed and compared the situation in Latin America and Europe, and concluded that there is less dependence on social media in Europe. But how should we measure the variable of dependence? In addition, I think the use of Facebook in Russia and East Asia mentioned in the article has no substantial effect on the argument of the article. I agree with the argument that the user base reflects the fragility of social media communications. Because of the existence of network externalities, the interruption of social media can have very serious consequences. However, the irreplaceability of social media has not been clearly pointed out. I think that further discussion of this feature of social media will make the article more convincing.
Hi Andries and thank you for this really relevant article! One question that I had since the outage happened but remained unaddressed here is why should a platform like WhatsApp be so closely dependent on Facebook and it’s “fucntionality”. I of course know that these apps/platforms all fall under the umbrella of Facebook, but I don’t see a reason why they shouldn’t be independent of each other, in order to prevent instances like the one we had few days ago. If Facebook or Instagram is down for example, it would be helpful if users could use one of the other remaining platforms to actually communicate etc., instead of all three being shut down at the same time.
Hi Andries, nice and comprehensive article. I think you talk about an important point that I also saw floating around on social media (aka Twitter) during the outage, namely that we may have become a little too dependent on the infrastructure that one massive commercial company created. And I definitely agree. Instagram and Facebook themselves are not the main problems in this I think, but especially WhatsApp, and probably FB Messenger in other countries, have such an amazingly strong grip on our communications it’s almost ludicrous. Now your post highlights that there are significant differences in the usage of Facebook owned apps between countries, but as you already mention, some of these countries are just very ‘dependent’ on other platforms (*cough* China). I don’t know the fine details, but I can imagine that if Alipay, or anything Alibaba related for that matter, goes offline for a moment, the results can be quite disastrous.