Billions of people from around the world have witnessed and experienced the network outages across multiple giant social media platforms which are owned and operated by Mark Zuckerberg. The outage included Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus and lasted for nearly six hours. For some this was just an outage in their social media posting, but for others this was a lot more than just social media. During those couple of hours, businesses lost connection with their clients and many people were not even able to contact their loved ones who they may only be able to reach through these media channels.
Facebook’s Cyber Security team did not state that the outage was caused by a cyber attack and they’ve mentioned that it is not likely to be an attack since the outage occurred with all platforms at the same exact time.”Facebook’s global security operations center determined the outage was a HIGH risk to the people, MODERATE risk to assets and a HIGH risk to the reputation of Facebook,” the company memo said (Gone in Minutes).
The outage wiped nearly $6 billion of Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth plus it caused uncalculated losses for business entities that rely on the platforms to conduct their business. Facebook restored the services with the help of its team after they were granted access to Facebook’s data center in Santa Clara and they reset the servers. Afterwards, the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared posts apologizing to the users and businesses about the major outage.
Naturally, the people and businesses who were affected by the outage still have many questions and are seeking explanations about what caused the outage. This incident has shocked the world for hours due to a total disconnect across multiple platforms which people depend upon throughout their daily lives. What happened was a disadvantage for both the users and companies that experienced the outage. Businesses were at a loss because they lost connectivity with their clients and users started considering other platforms such as SnapChat and TikTok and millions of downloads to other similar platforms took place during the outage. Not to mention Facebook’s shares went down by nearly 5% the same day-equivalent to billions of dollars.
The group of companies led by Mark Zuckerberg will not recover from the outage easily even though all platforms were reset and the platforms are now live again. Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure said “configuration changes on the backbone routers,” were to blame. Mark Zuckerberg will certainly put a plan in place to restructure things at his data centers to avoid major outages to all platforms operated by the company. From a risk management perspective the platforms should operate separately so if one goes down the rest remain operating, so the damage becomes limited.
Social media platforms were originally built for people to socialize via the internet and when they became normalized as a new way of communicating and millions and even then billions of people started to join the virtual world until the majority started relying on social media platforms as part of their daily routines. This attracted businesses to advertise through those platforms and that became the business model for social media platforms and main source of income as businesses started relying more and more on boosting their brands, products, and services to the targeted users.
Specialized platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, and SnapChat have proven themselves to be lower risk for their users since they are not bundled with other essential platforms and therefore an outage with one will not bring down other platforms.
Mobility Intel provides a specialized B2B networking tool for the consumer electronics industry where companies meet each other and interact directly and publicly via posts or via encrypted messages. We had taken extensive safety precautions even before this outage event occurred and made sure to separate our servers that run other software, tools, and solutions to avoid the domino effect outage that occurred with Facebook. They say don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and that is a philosophy we follow to minimize as many types of risks and threats as we possibly can.
This is brought to you by Abdul Loul; I’m the Founder and CEO here at Mobility Intel Inc. Tune in every week where we share our views on different topics from around the world.
Original Articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-down.html?smid=url-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/zuckerberg-loses-7-billion-in-hours-as-facebook-plunges
