Social media outages

All three of Facebook’s major social networking platforms went offline for several hours late on Monday, with the outage lasting well into the early hours of Tuesday. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were largely inaccessible for several hours, with the first reports of the global outage being seen around 10:45PM in Pakistan. While some users could access some services over the next few hours, reports of problems were still making on to Twitter and other social media almost eight hours later. At its peak, the outage was so extreme that users reported Gmail, TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram and other social media platforms had also slowed down due to millions of netizens migrating platforms. But even the alternatives offered no relief to people who use their Facebook credentials to log in and use games and services provided by unrelated websites.

Staff at the Facebook-owned platforms later said that even internal communications and networks were affected, comparing their time in the office to a “snow day” at school since they could not get any work done. But while several Facebook staffers may have been enjoying their “snow day”, several thousand small businesses worldwide lost millions of dollars as they rely on the company’s social media platforms for direct and indirect commercial activities and customer relations. Meanwhile, several governments and businesses also rely on Facebook messenger and WhatsApp for internal communications. Whether or not this policy is good or bad is a separate issue, but we all know that social media has one of the only easy ways to get official work done.

While Facebook has so far kept mum on the cause of the outage, some tech experts noted that Facebook appeared to have withdrawn its “authoritative DNS routes”, which are the pathway through which internet traffic reaches its platforms. Some of Facebook’s DNS records had temporarily disappeared which, in the physical world, is akin to a building just vanishing with everything inside. Whether this was due to malicious causes such as hacking, or simple human error, is still unclear. However, what is clear is that Facebook made a case for breaking up big tech companies by showing the disastrous societal and economic consequences of allowing leading social media platforms to operate under the same ownership.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2021.

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