Social media giant Facebook experienced an outage that lasted for about six 6 hours. Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, and Oculus VR were all inaccessible for almost 6 hours.

It has been reported that Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth fell by US$ 6 Billion due to this outage.

Billions of users were left wondering what was going on, Downdetector, which tracks outages recorded about 10.6 million problem reports. In reality, more people and businesses were affected during this time.

 

Friends and families that rely on these platforms for communication were left stranded and many small businesses could not communicate with their customers.

Even some applications that require Facebook login such as Pokemon Go were affected.

The problem as reported by Santosh Janardhan was:

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.

This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

Facebook apologized for this outage,

Here is what we have learnt from this outage:

Firstly, Facebook has shown how much it dominates the social media space, there was a communication void around the world during the outage, and people turned to Telegram and Twitter, this did not solve the problem, however. It was reported that Telegram slowed down due to an increase in traffic.

Even those who knew what had happened to Facebook could hardly communicate to others to let them know of other available platforms.

It can be rightly said that Facebook services have become part of our lives and something felt wrong and weird during the outage period as seen from the reactions of people around the globe.

 

Secondly, Given the dominance of Facebook in the social media circles, it would be a good idea to have a backup social media account with other Social media platforms as an alternative in an event that things go south. This will help us to stay connected even if one social media platform goes down.

Thirdly, small Businesses should seek alternative ways to stay online without relying so much on Big Social media platforms. I’m sure some valuables dollars of some businesses were lost during these 6 hours of outage.

Lastly, the stock market can be unforgiving.

It only took 6 hours for Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth to fall by US$ 6 Billion at the rate of US$ 1 Billion per hour loosely speaking. This speaks volumes and we leave it to the reader to do the analysis.

In conclusion, Facebook’s services are great Platforms that we have learnt to love and live with. They help us to connect with family and friends, to do business and to connect with the global community.

However, this outage just shows us how much we rely on Facebook to power some of our day to day activities.

Wouldn’t it be great to have another platform nearly of that magnitude as an alternative? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.