Last Monday, billions of people were all of a sudden unable to use their primary means of communication (Peermohamed, 2021). Usually, news of this magnitude then gets extensively covered on Facebook and Instagram, and discussed via WhatsApp, but not this time because it just so happened to be that these social media giants were the victim of this massive communication outage.
The breakdown of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which are all part of the Facebook imperium, painfully displayed two important things. It the first place, this was a reality check for all users, showing how we completely take these social media platforms, and thereby a very big part of our communication, for granted. Secondly, it showed how vulnerable we are if an event like this takes place.
Of course, for some people these few hours will have felt like a welcome break from all the social media madness, but it is also safe to say that the outage will have had great consequences for some (Global Citizen, 2021). Whether it is a group of students hindered in their communication on the evening of a deadline, a parent that can’t reach its child when its cycling home from football practice, or a company which is highly reliable on social media advertisements seeing their campaigns go down the drain, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have taken on an incredibly important position in our lives.
And that is not a good thing. For many reasons, like phone addiction and a poor self-image among young children, but for now lets focus on the vulnerability of our communication. Because, this time the breakdown might have been a simple mistake by some engineer (a mistake with far-far-reaching consequences), but the next time it might also be a group of hackers, or even more frightening, a foreign power with bad intentions.
This is even more important for other parts of the worlds, because where we still have access to other forms of communication like text messaging, large areas in for instance Asia and South America are completely reliant on Facebook to communicate (Sweney, 2021).
Maybe we should regard last Monday as a wake-up call. Maybe it is time to structurally rethink the way we communicate and how immensely dependent we have become on Facebook to do so. Maybe we should start decentralizing our communication and not be (almost) completely dependent on one company. Whether that is by implementing another medium to communicate or by letting Facebook decentralize itself, we should start soon.
References:
Global Citizen. (2021, 7 oktober). How Did the Facebook Outage Impact People in Lower-Income Countries? https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/facebook-outage-developing-countries/
Peermohamed, A. (2021, 6 oktober). The Facebook outage: What exactly happened? The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/the-facebook-outage-what-exactly-happened/articleshow/86779254.cms
Sweney, M. (2021, 5 oktober). 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
