outage – Social Blog

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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

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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].

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