2021 Social Media Fiasco

We are experiencing, a sudden delay or halt in most social media services like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others; what has it cost us the users?

The 2021 Social media Fiasco

The month of October has brought about a medley of curiosity and anger about Facebook and Whatsapp most especially.

New York Times: unlikely a hack; FB employees unable to enter the building in a.m • Servers likely behind the problem: CTO • Facebook stocks • Zuckerberg lost $7 billion: Bloomberg • Global loss > $160 million/hr

The seizure potentially disturbed hundreds of millions of users of these apps across the globe from accessing, sending, or receiving messages, on these platforms.

Late Monday, Facebook and the social media apps it owns, WhatsApp and Instagram, suffered a major global outage, including in India, lasting several hours.

Facebook made a tweet in which they wrote, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience”.

WhatsApp, too, tweeted: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”

The Facebook family of apps suffered a major outage earlier this year in March when the services were down for almost 45 minutes. Before this, in 2020 alone, four major WhatsApp outages had occurred, of which the most major one was in January, which had lasted around three hours. After this, there was one in April, followed by a two-hour outage in July and a brief one in August.