With nearly 3.5billion people using the social media app – Facebook and its affiliate apps WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. We have always wondered what would happen if it all went down in an instant? And quite recently we got the answer – Wifi Memes, a flurry of Tweets, and the search for instant messaging apps. On October 4th Facebook witnessed a downtime for nearly 6 hours, leaving the 3.5 billion users hanging. What this downtime did was create a lot of laughter with fun Memes floating around online for the next couple of hours while Twitter had its long lost users return to using the platform again to tweet about the downtime, or at least until the other apps were back online.

Digital Detox

While this downtime was a huge inconvenience, we believe it did do some good. The downtime experienced by the billions of users possibly forced them to walk towards their Wifi router systems to check if the internet was down. And not just that I’m sure a lot of users would have enjoyed a much needed social media detox. 

Consuming a lot of social media content could be overwhelming and time consuming for sure. While the consumption of digital data is increasing at a rapid pace, some users are even turning to leverage social media to tell a story and create content to add value to people out there. There has been a shift of the kind of content we have access to these days. While there is a lot of content to consume out there, it is also important to let the mind relax and practice a social media detox every once in a while to keep our mental health in check.

About the Downtime

Billions of users wondered if their internet crashed or their phones weren’t working properly, such was the case on the 4th of october 2021. The most used apps in the world – Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went down in the night around 9pm IST for nearly approximately 6hours. The outage not only disrupted the social media world but also businesses and politicians who use the social media apps to communicate with their supporters were affected. The engineering teams at Facebook assured that they were working hard at resolving the outage.

The downtime lasted approximately 6 hours and was due to an error in the configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate the network traffic between facebook’s data centers. The downtime affected the internal tools and systems at Facebook, making it difficult to resolve the issues quicker.

This downtime was a small snippet of what the world would look like without Social Media, and also highlights the importance of cybersecurity. All I can say is that, we hope movies like Terminator or Matrix don’t become a reality. With that being said, we must understand the importance of building secure apps and systems in place that we are always in control of. Who knows what the next outage might be and how it might affect our world that is beaming with technology.