The outage of Facebook and its family of applications leads to significant disruptions in the work of companies around the world, just as happened in early October.
We suspect that Mark Zuckerberg reads the comments that people leave on his Facebook posts. But, if he did that, it would take him approximately 145 days, without sleep, to break through the flood of comments left to him after he apologized for the interruption of all his services on October 4.
Billions of People Have Become Dependent on Internet
After six hours of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram crashes, the founder and CEO of Facebook apologized for the inconvenience. Facebook blamed routine maintenance for the nuisance – its engineers launched a command that inadvertently shut down Facebook’s data centers from the wider Internet. About 827,000 people responded to Mark Zuckerberg’s apology.
The messages ranged from funny (one Italian user wrote that it was scary because he had to talk to the family) to confused where one user from Namibia posted how he took his phone to the service thinking it was broken. Of course, there were very upset and angry comments, like that of one of the Nigerian businessman who wrote that everything must not go out at the same time because the consequences will be of unimaginable proportions. Another user, from India, asked for compensation for the interruption of his work.
What has now become apparent, if not earlier, is the extent to which billions of people have become dependent on these services – not only for entertainment but also for basic communication and commerce. What is also obvious is that this is far from a one-off situation: experts suggest that widespread Internet outages are becoming more frequent and devastating.
There’s an Ongoing Trend Regarding the Delivery of Content That’s Backfiring
One of the things we have seen in the last few years is an increasing reliance on a small number of networks and companies that serve us with large pieces of content. When one of them, or more than one, has a problem, it affects not only them but also hundreds of thousands of other services. Facebook, for example, is now used to enter a wide range of different services and devices, such as smart TVs, etc. And so we have those ‘snowy days of the Internet’ that are happening to us regularly now. Something crashes and we all look at each other and just say, “Well, so what can we do?”
Platforms that monitor services and websites in search of interference say that widespread downtime affecting large services is becoming more frequent and serious. When Facebook has problems, it leaves great consequences on the entire Internet, but also on the economy and, as you already know, society as a whole. Millions, or potentially hundreds of millions of people, are just sitting and waiting for a small team in California to fix something. It is an interesting phenomenon that has grown in the last few years.
Inevitably, at some point, during a major service outage, people begin to worry that the outage is the result of some kind of cyber-attack. But experts suggest it is most often an example of a more banal case of human error combined, they say, with the way the Internet is kept active through a complex set of outdated and unstable systems. During the fall of Facebook, experts joked on Twitter that some of the culprits or the reasons for the problems with the crash were older than Spice Girls and that they were designed on a napkin.
The Internet Isn’t What Its Original Architects Had in Mind
We could largely agree with this characterization. The Internet is not a massively distributed network that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the original architects of the Internet, tried to create, which can withstand a nuclear attack in every part of it. The protocols it uses are practically the same as those designed when we connected to mainframe computers from ‘stupid’ terminals. A single mistake at the core of its infrastructure can tear the whole thing to pieces.
The good news is that improvements can be made to make the Internet more resilient, but many of the basics of the Internet will remain the same, whether good or bad. Generally speaking, systems work and you cannot just turn off certain internet protocols for a day to try to improve them. Instead of trying to reconstruct the systems and structure of the Internet, experts think that the way we use it to store and share data must be improved or else we risk more massive outages in the future. The Internet has become too centralized, which means that too much data comes from one source. This trend needs to be reversed in systems that have multiple nodes so that one failure cannot stop the entire service.
There’s a Light at the End of the Tunnel
But, there is a bit of luck in this whole accident. Although major Internet drops affect lives and businesses, they can, in the end, help increase the resilience of the Internet and the web services connected to it. For example, Facebook is estimated to have lost $ 66 million during the aforementioned six-hour outage due to inactivity, exodus, or advertisers. It is a very serious situation, and Facebook risks losing some big names behind it, such as AT& T, Netflix, American Express, and even licensed gambling operators (the full list can be seen at TopCasinoExpert.com) who get more and more space on this social media. Such a loss will most likely force senior executives to focus a little on making sure it does not happen again.
Facebook lost a huge amount of money that day, not only in the price of shares but also in operating income. And, if you look at the downtime caused by content delivery networks like Fastly and Cloudflare, they also lost a large number of customers who switched to competition. Therefore, the prevailing opinion is that these operators are doing everything they can to maintain the stability of the Internet.
About The Author
Ashley Rosa
Ashley Rosa is a freelance writer and blogger. As writing is her passion that why she loves to write blogs related to the latest trends in technology and sometimes on health-tech as well. She is crazy about food.
