How much are we dependent on social media services for communication? How much time do we spend on them on an average daily basis that they are so integral to everything we do? Well, I was pondering over such questions last night when suddenly all the media platforms owned by Facebook-Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram became inaccessible for about five hours. It was being speculated that the issue was due to global server outrage. However, services are back in function as I am writing this article.
It was around 8:20 p.m IST Facebook began displaying error messages on internet servers and Whatsapp messages were not being delivered. Count in the fact that Facebook has over 3.4 billion global users and over 397 million in India – one can estimate how crucial the platforms are for connectivity and communication.
Also with their ardent new features, they are increasingly being used in conducting businesses, live streaming, and as primary accounts for other digital services. Many of them complained of the losses that they are facing due to the services being out.
Facebook soon acknowledged the outrage, and apologized for the same when services were back again, “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.”
The company claimed that the main cause of it were configuration issues with its DNS servers and routers, as Facebook’s CTO Mark Schroepfer, tweeted, “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Even Whatsapp and Instagram reached out to their users and made tweets acknowledging the issues.
While such outrages are common, for many apps of the largest social media platforms to go down for hours at once was highly unusual. This was also the next major global outrage for Facebook after 2019 when its services across all apps were out for an hour. Whatsapp had then labelled the issue to be “caused by technical problems”.
What makes last night’s outrage rather controversial than being simple server issues is the recent scrutiny of the company after whistle-blower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager distributed thousands of pages of amassed internal research to the news media, lawmakers and regulators in the US, revealing that Facebook knew many harms of its services, regarding the mental well-being of teenagers and especially that Instagram was affecting teenage girls over their body image.
She appeared in an interview with CBS news show “60 Minutes” on Sunday, stating – Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything and is scheduled to testify on the same in US Congress on Tuesday.
This has caused the social media giant to be embroiled in a battle with Haugen, US Lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal, which was a great matter of concern as shares of Facebook went down 5.45% to trade at $324.31 at around 1:30 pm ET.
But apart from all the technical glitches and controversial pieces was the field day for Twitter and memes. With all major platforms down, people reacted hilariously to issues, trolling the sites and showing their creativity.
Twitter itself took to addressing the masses by posting “hello literally everyone”. Followed by a slew of responses from Whatsapp, Instagram, McDonald’s, Microsoft and IDF among many more, and was an engaging entertainer in itself.
It’s an innate quality to make the best of every situation, you just have to be creative!!!
