Seven hours made us realize how much we depend on Facebook

Facebook has got the right side of its problems. Shortly after midnight, users started accessing their accounts again and the company reports that the services are slowly starting to work again.

© Gorm Kallestad / NTB / TT

For seven hours on Monday night, Facebook-owned Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp services were down across the world.

Shortly after midnight, Swedish time, Facebook began to show signs of working again, and the company announced that as of 00.28, Swedish time, “the global internet has been reconnected”, but it may take time for all users to come to all services.

Facebook apologize

“Our services are now back online and we are working hard to make them fully available,” Facebook wrote in a statement apologizing to the company, stressing that there was no evidence that user data had been compromised or released.

According to Facebook, the reasons for the denial were attempts to change the configuration in a number of routers that coordinate traffic between Facebook’s servers. This resulted in a snowball effect which led to the closure of sites.

“The underlying causes have also affected many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to be able to quickly diagnose and solve problems,” she wrote.

Researcher: We depend on Facebook

Brooke Duffy, Senior Lecturer at Cornell University in the US, researches how media, technology and culture converge, and notes that it is no coincidence that many users today rely heavily on Facebook.

“Over the past decade, Facebook has done several things to become a fixture in our daily lives: We rely on the services not only for communication, but also for information on everything from local events to global politics,” she said in an email interview with TT, He adds:

“Only in light of the current outages, many of us have realized how dependent we are on a platform often portrayed as outdated (especially in comparison to the relatively newcomer Tiktok).”

In addition to the fact that users during the outage were unable to pass their feeds or write to their acquaintances, this affected the company that relied on cross-platform sales, as well as the advertisers who used them to be visible.

“What shocks many is how this collective dependence is taken for granted,” says Brock Duffy.

A global outage of the other so-called massive platforms, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, could have a similar effect. And according to Duffy, there are things to be learned from Monday’s eruption.

Tech giants and social media companies in particular are more volatile and skewed than the media companies that have dominated during the 20th century. In addition to the widespread outages we have seen today, these companies have developed by leaps and bounds. The changes they make, from new features to tweaking algorithms, can have serious consequences for users and creators.”

Millions of reports

The disruptions began to be reported after 5:30 p.m., according to Downdetector, which reports that during the evening they received more than 10.6 million reports of outages.

Users who visited the Facebook site were met with an error message that the site could not be reached. The error message indicated that the browser was not redirected to its destination and indicated that there was something wrong with the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is often compared to the phone book of the Internet, allowing the browser to find the right directory.

The Facebook platform has about 2.9 billion users.