4th of October 2021 was a marvelous day. Another kind of Liberation day?
For a couple of hours Facebook and its tremendously popular apps WhatsApp, Instagram were down.
Why?
A cyber attack was excluded - but the possibility was taken into account at first. From what I could gather, the problem was caused by Facebook's DNS server. The sites facebook.com , instagram.com whatsapp.com disappeared because the DNS server did not "recognize" them and could not assign these an IP Address.
Without an IP address nothing exists online.
I find very interesting the following facts :
- the huge gap created by the outage of three products, the whole world stopped for a few hours . The Facebook employees themselves could not talk among themselves ! In order to solve the problem, someone had to go physically to the locations where the servers are, because a remote connection could not be established!!
-Facebook is being used to log into multiple platforms, which is making the log in smoother but as you can understand, the outage caused self multiplying problems.
-Facebook was loosing money by the second, the platform is being used by millions of companies for advertising
- WhatsApp, Messenger where also down and all of a sudden people lost connection to their families and the world.
-in some countries Facebook means the Internet. For them the Internet stopped for a few hours. It will be interesting to see how did they manage this outfall.
A few things we might need to take into account after this :
- why is a single concern given so much power and its products are therefore literally creating our reality ? A rhetoric question, I know.
- what are the alternatives?
-the digital world we live in and Facebook makes it with each click- is it the world we really want to live in?
It was quite for a few hours but not in our minds.
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