The Facebook outage : a massive disruption worldwide
Facebook Down?
Facebook's app and its website, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, went dark for several hours. Then they appeared to be slowly coming back up.
While many people assumed that the outage was caused by hackers and were worried about possible data leakage, Facebook stated on Tuesday, Oct 5, and revealed the cause. The statement explained that the problem was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers.
This problem caused a cascading effect, therefore, bringing all Facebook services to a halt.
3.5 billion people worldwide were affected by the outage of Facebook and its apps
Still, these outages were a massive disruption for the more than 3.5 billion people worldwide who use this app to communicate with their families, distribute political messages and do business through advertising and outreach.
All the Facebook apps went down for about six hours, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. So for several hours, no one, including the security engineers of Facebook, could not enter their offices or access their systems. The problem was amplified by the fact that Facebook stores internal communications on its own platform.
The affect of the outage was not only limited to Facebook and its Apps. Facebook is also used as the sign-in to many other services and apps. It led to ramifications such as people not being able to use their smart TVs, log into shopping websites, etc.
Why do we even pay attention to this?
Nowadays, when we talk about the internet, one of the first things that come to mind is social media; who wouldn’t think of Facebook as the best example of social media.
The impact of social media in our lives is sharing thoughts, pictures, and videos, and many businesses rely on these social media. Facebook is the way people do business and advertise worldwide; the outage directly affects businesses.
WhatsApp considers as one of the most popular forms of communication worldwide. For many families worldwide, WhatsApp is the only way of communicating with their children who study or live abroad. Therefore, many people trusted Whatsapp to be the only way to communicate with their elders and check on them daily. But of course, this outage made everyone have a second thought about putting their trust in this platform to be the only way of communication.
Within few hours after Facebook and its apps vanished from the internet, people started migrating to alternative apps such as Telegram and Twitter. (This can be considered as a virtual migration when all family members sign up for an account in a new platform and create the family group in another platform to communicate with each other!)
Now the question is, will they go back to using Whatsapp?! After all, their trust in the app was corrupted!
Was it the worst timing for Facebook?
People were concerned about Facebook, and affiliated apps kept searching in google and Twitter about the interruption, "what is wrong with Facebook", "what is the problem in Facebook." This could cause a Facebook massive problem since they kept reading hundreds of articles about the weaknesses and disadvantages of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Additionally, another debate has come up, how social media, specifically Instagram, is terrible for teenagers; Facebook as a platform includes hate speech and misinformation.
Indeed it shows the danger of Facebook having such infrastructure on the internet. It must be alarming that people also consider using Facebook to log in to other apps and websites. Furthermore, they use it to log into their smart home system and so on. So this mega internet company directly influences people's lives in one way or another. If in some way goes down, it's catastrophic!
Facebook is essential for people to get on to the internet. Still, it is alarming since it plays a vital role in the central part of the internet.
