Facebook’s Outage Has Ripple Effects
On Wednesday, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram’s servers went down, rendering the platforms unavailable to most users across the globe.
This happening at a time when new Federal Prosecutors from New York were currently conducting a criminal probe into the company’s private users’ sharing policies was another streak of bad luck for both Mark Zuckerberg and the company.
While Facebook apologized for the inconveniences and appreciated its users’ patience over the issue, it vehemently dismissed rising speculations that the interruption was a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
It stated that the interruption happened because of a server configuration change. Its services have been fully restored once again and the platforms are now operational.
While the outage – believed to be the worst the company had ever encountered – lasted for almost the entire day, it spiraled a truckload of effects into motion:
Facebook’s stocks at the New York Stock Exchange fell nearly 3% in trading following the interruption, the biggest it had ever experienced in a long time.
Advertisings who were running ads on Facebook and Instagram were reportedly upset; the interruption crippled their ROIs, hindering their services from getting to their intended customers.
In D.C, campaigners were calling for the break-up of Facebook and its owned-properties: WhatsApp and Instagram, stressing that the integration of tech companies in Silicon Valley is not only dangerous for consumers but will continue to experience epic failures like the outage.
It would also seem that the unfortunate server downtime was a blessing in disguise for other social media platforms, particularly Telegram. While the power outage occurred globally, Telegram amassed about 3 million new users. This was a significant number of new subscribers to the UK-based service.
Even though no one can confirm that Telegram’s new users joined them because of the issue with Facebook, the timing is not a coincidence.
The excitement was evident in Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov’s post in his private channel:
“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours. Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”
Telegram, similar to WhatsApp, is a free encrypted messaging platform, equipped with end-to-end encryption for both voice calls and messaging for iOS, Android, Windows NT, macOS, and Linux. While Telegram boosts of 200 million active monthly users, the amount may experience a spike if Facebook experience another downtime in the future.
