Hangover weekend and Monday blues, the evil twins, are made better by connecting with loved ones at the end of the day. If not that, then scrolling through social media provides a brief reprieve. However, this stress outlet was nowhere to be found on October 5, 2021.
On Monday the world had to suffer through the temporary shutdown of the social media giant, Facebook, and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp, Messenger, Oculus, and Instagram. Unable to access the websites and apps, people first blamed their internet and WIFI connection. It was later realized that the applications mentioned were facing a global outage. It turned out that a configuration change in the routers caused the services to crash.
Competitor’s Heyday
Users worldwide and many Facebook employees were inconvenienced. But competitors and other brands took this as an opportunity to make their presence down. Twitter, YouTube, Discord drew people in flocks. Even Facebook turned to Twitter to give updates.
Twitter and Telegram benefited the most out of the situation. While Telegram saw a sudden growth in the number of users looking for a way to connect with one another. Twitter turned sarcastic and greeted everyone with a witty little tweet, “Hello Literally Everyone”, acknowledging the internet users flooding in.
Business’ Doomsday
In a country as wide as India, one can easily see 53 crore WhatsApp users, 21 crore Instagram users, and 41 crore Facebook users. Many businesses depend on the engagement on Facebook to create an outreach for products. The servers being down created a huge loss in revenues. Small businesses and content creators suffered the worst. For a company that projects itself sitting at the peak of social media and communication, its efforts to better its data transfer have not borne fruit.
Facebook has become synonymous with the Internet in many places, not just because of its extensive use, but people utilizing it as a sign-in option in many other apps and services. The halt in the usability of the platform leads to unexpected domino effects such as people not being able to log into shopping websites or smart TVs, thermostats, and other internet-connected devices.
Has this happened before?
A network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc, ThousandEyes, revealed the data that confirms that there were 367 global internet outages in the week ending 26 September. The continuously increasing number of such incidents is making it the third consecutive week of snowballing outages.
What is to be done if it happens again?
It is always advised not to keep all the eggs in one basket, for having an advantageous position in situations like these. Mark Zukerberg has tried to create a monopoly in the social media market by claiming the major channels of communication under him. However, the outage shook the internet users and the smart ones are already looking for the options that can be trusted and used if the horrid situations of outage repeat themselves in the future as well. People and Businesses shall start with using other applications for communication already so that they don’t have to begin with ABC in the case of Deja Vous.