As time moves ever deeper into
the 21st Century, it becomes ever more obvious that this is the age
of social networking. From networks like Facebook to media-sharing platforms as
big as YouTube to as little as TikTok, people use online connections even more
than ever before. It also becomes clear that online connectivity via social
media is no longer a perk but a necessity. In the current years with the global
pandemic, social media platforms were a godsend: to conduct business, to teach
classes online, and so much more. So what would happen if these platforms
suddenly went offline?
Large parts of the world got to
experience that in October 4, when Facebook and other commonly-used social
media services went down as reported by The
Verge. These platforms such as Messenger, Instagram and Oculus are all
under the overall Facebook umbrella as well. Starting from before noon of the 4th,
Eastern Time, services in FB and the aforementioned platforms just stopped.
Towards evening Facebook gave official word on unaffected social media services
(like Twitter) that a configuration issue caused the loss of connection.
By about 5:30 PM (ET), FB and
Instagram were back to normal. The shutdown occurred at different hours
according to time zones around the world. The Philippines for example, lost FB
connection overnight into October 5.
Facebook Communications Executive
Andy Stone explains in a Twitter post that networking issues were at the heart
of the sudden service outage. Other than assurances that service teams were
addressing the problems and that no user data was lost, the social media giant
did not elaborate on the issue. Inside sources note that as part of the repair
efforts engineers were sent to several FB data centers across the US.
In the wake of the Facebook social
media umbrella’s momentary connectivity loss, outside tech observers have
provided speculation on what just happened. Web infrastructure and security
firm Cloudflare points out that the issue may have been caused by the sudden
withdrawal from the internet of FB’s border gateway protocols (BGPs) which help
online networks choose the optimal route for internet traffic. While there is
no hard information corroborating it, rumors abound that the brief outage may
have played into Facebook’s damage control following a former
executive-turned-whistleblower going to the Federal government with allegations
that the social networking giant was willingly allowing “hate-speech” content
to propagate in its platform for profits.
Image from Times of Israel
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