What Did We Learn From Last Weeks Facebook Crash?
If you don’t know what i’m on about, you’ve officially been living under a rock for the past week.
This time last week, the entire suite of Facebook Group products went offline for about 6 hours. Leaving social media managers and marketers curled up in the corner crying, and millions of people disconnected from their loved ones.
Yes, the crash encouraged us to talk face to face, and of course the crash made us aware how much we rely on these apps. But that doesn’t even make up a quarter of the problem that last weeks crash caused…not even an eighth!
But how did it happen?
Last Wednesday, The Facebook Group reluctantly explained (as they usually do) how it’s three main products were able to shutdown simultaneously;
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” wrote Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president for engineering and infrastructure.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
TIME Magazine reveal their latest issue on October 8th.
TIME Magazine reveal their latest issue on October 8th.
This is not the first time we’ve experienced some of our favourite apps go down, but we have never experienced three of the biggest social media apps crash simultaneously before.
Which is why it infuriates me when people say “It’s not that deep”.
The Facebook Group (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is the lifeblood of 1000’s of small businesses, the career of millions of marketers, and for the countless people living in 3rd world or developing companies, it is their only access to the internet.
The developing world
So what was a minor inconvenience to many, caused severe issues across the developing world.
On Monday Nic McKinley (founder of DeliverFund) told People magazine of the true impact;
"They're not free to download Signal or other comparable apps. So now their communications are completely exposed to their governments," he told PEOPLE. Signal is a messaging platform that allows for secure communications with end-to-end encryption for groups and individuals.
Not having access to a secure messaging platform doesn't only impact dissidents, or those who might be trying to hide their communications from the government, McKinley added.
"If you're a regular person who is trying to figure out what the best price for your goats are, you are impacted," he said. "The world has really taken technologies for granted, so most likely they don't have a backup for that group on WhatsApp that crowdsources the best goat prices at different markets. That now isn't available, so that person needs to take the risk for going to the wrong market."
Others who may be severely impacted by these social platforms going offline include human trafficking victims and refugees. For example, in Afghanistan, people are using WhatsApp to communicate about Taliban checkpoints. In the developing world, communities share information online to stay safe.
Facebook vs AOC
We’ve all watched and mocked government officials try understand how social media works in the courtroom these past few years. It’s the perfect reason why we need more of AOC’s generation forming our policies, until the crash it looked like no big changes would be made. Unless you count an American senator asking Facebook how they plan on removing their “Finsta” products.
But following the outage, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the opportunity to call for the ‘monopolistic’ and ‘destructive’ company to be broken up.
The Democratic congresswoman took aim at the social media giant on rival network Twitter Monday as Facebook was in the grips of a massive blackout that sent Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger offline and lost the company an estimated $100 million in revenue.
Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 19.39.58.png
Screenshot 2021-10-09 at 19.40.29.png
What would normally be “I’m sorry, let’s move on” has snowballed into a $7Billion loss for Zuckberg and the potential for change.
Should Facebook be broken up?
Prior to educating myself for this article, I wouldn’t have been bothered either way. As a marketer, it makes managing profiles incredibly easy. But the wider implications of such a monopoly can be catastrophic for developing communities, and impact free speech in a bigger way than the Cambridge Analytica scandal.