Five Steps in Every #DeleteFacebook Online Activism Journey
#3 Telegram won’t stop notifying you of your acquaintances joining it
On 4 October, Facebook, uh sorry Meta, and its family of apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook) went down for six hours in what is considered the longest such outage for the Menlo Park-based company.
There have been instances of these services going offline, but in most instances, they were back online within an hour or so.
This time it was different.
According to Facebook Engineering, this was the reason given for the unprecedented outage:
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.
Every time these services go down or one of them announces a tweak to their privacy policy, there is a predictable pattern to the responses.
Having worked in the technology reporting space for over ten years, I have covered many of these outages.
