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