Facebook’s 6-hour outage is the worst in years, affecting Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
To make matters worse, it wasn’t just affecting customers but also caused major disruptions on internal systems with employees unable to enter office buildings or get any work done.
The outage continued as markets closed, causing Facebook’s stock to drop by 5%. That may seem a lot, but the trillion-dollar company has nearly 3 billion monthly active users causing a lot of disruption.
It’s also important to remember that many developing countries and small businesses rely on the Facebook network to run their businesses. An outage of 6 hours means no orders through Instagram or WhatsApp.
It’s a reminder of the monopoly Facebook has over communications and services around the world. This has led to more conversation, being led by US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Facebook should be broken up in
her latest post on Instagram.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see if this outage does spark a bigger conversation around tech monopolies or if these companies are now simply too big to fail.