Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which are all Facebook-owned companies, were down for over six hours yesterday, leaving netizens across the world perplexed and furious throughout the night. Each of the three platforms has billions of users that log in daily.
This is one of the company’s longest outages in its history; numerous small businesses were affected, and e-commerce was substantially delayed. People could not communicate essential information and were forced to rely on other applications.
The worldwide social media outage began around 10 p.m. on October 4 and continued until the early hours of October 5, and people depended on apps like Twitter and Telegram. Some of the reasons for the social media outage were turned into memes, but there was little clarity as to why it was happening or why the applications were down for so long.
REASON BEHIND THE OUTAGE
Although no official statements were made in the early hours of the social media outrage, it was suspected that the Facebook site was under assault. There was also talk of hacker activity and data breaches on the internet during this period.
In response to millions of users’ concerns, Facebook, the parent company of all three social media companies, issued a statement “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage.
The worldwide social media outage, according to Facebook, cut off connections between the company’s data centres, causing a chain reaction of problems that ended in the servers being cut off from one another.
According to the firm, Facebook’s engineers were also unable to detect the problems first since internal systems were also affected.
CEO REACTS
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, stated that the services of the social media app, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, are slowly coming back online.
He said, “Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today. We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share.”
IMPACT OF FACEBOOK ON USERS
For many of Facebook’s roughly 3 billion users, the impact was considerably greater, demonstrating how much the rest of the world has grown to rely on it and its assets – to operate companies, interact with online communities, log on to many other websites, and even purchase meals.
It also demonstrated that, despite the availability of platforms such as Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat, and a slew of others, nothing could replace the social network that has effectively developed into vital infrastructure over the last 17 years.
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