On Monday, October 4, something happened to Facebook that hasn’t happened in nearly a decade; a six hour outage that had Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline. Is it a deeper sign of trouble for both the company and society?
ZACH MCCRARY, REPORTER: On Monday this week, the world as we know it was business as usual. But then, the absolutely unimaginable happened: Facebook went dark. The social media site, as well as its other properties, were completely inaccessible for about six hours. For those unaware, this also includes not just Facebook Messenger, but also Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Oculus. Imagine playing some VR game and it just kicks you out because you have to be constantly connected to your Facebook account in order to even play anything.
Herein lies the problem with Facebook, a problem that many people have been complaining about for years at this point: its constant want to know what you’re doing, what you’re watching, what you’re looking to buy, what you’re interested in, who your friends and family are. It’s probably data mining at its most efficient and most opaque.
But we’ll get back to that in a bit. First, what even caused the blackout in the first place?
According to multiple Facebook internal memos, the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between […] data centers,” which ended up causing a massive ripple throughout all of Facebook’s products. Inside Facebook, even employees were impeded in communicating with each other during the site’s outage. Per Alex Heath of The Verge, employees “resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts” rather than their internal Facebook-dependent messaging system and “couldn’t send or receive emails from external addresses.”
Beyond internal breakdown, many people rely on Facebook both as a means of selling goods and services and as a way of communication. WhatsApp alone has over two billion users, many of whom use it as their primary messaging apps. In countries where SMS messaging is very costly, using cellular data to send messages is likely much cheaper; that phenomenon allows apps like WhatsApp to become a viable alternative. It’s free and it’s reliable, right?
Apparently not. If in October of last year, 100 billion messages were sent every day, that would mean an outage of six hours would prevent about 25 billion messages from being sent. It’s a massive clot in the international information superhighway.
So many people depend on Facebook to constantly be available to keep up their social life and day-to-day business. With that much daily attention, Facebook has the potential to influence and directly control what information we see daily, what products and brands we see, and who has more visibility on the Internet. But Facebook could never abuse that power… right?
Amid claims by whistleblower and former Facebook employee
Frances Haugen, the social media site is facing backlash over profiting off of children and teenagers despite studies showing that the use of its products exacerbates rates of suicidal thoughts and eating disorders in teenage girls, specifically. Congressmen across the aisle are now agreeing on one thing: Facebook’s market share and sheer power should be reigned in.
But for now, we live in this world that depends on the Internet for the constant exchange of information, and Facebook just happens to be the one company that is likely the number one facilitator of that exchange. What would life be like without it now? For a brief moment on Monday, we found out.
For WNUR News, I’m Zach McCrary.
