Facebook Outage — Another Wakeup Call

The problem with Facebook is not social media, it is Facebook. In its quest to dominate the social media sphere Facebook is not satisfied with staying the dominant social media app. Instead, Facebook wants to become the internet itself. Facebook’s growth strategy is to become the entry point to all the communications and information in everyone’s life. It strives to be the gateway to your life. This is a dangerous thing.

If yesterday’s almost six hour-long outage wasn’t a wakeup call about the dangers of Facebook, then Facebook has won. It is now back online. But imagine of it wasn’t. Think about what the loss would be to you. Let us start with a simple example. If you have children or your family has children, think about the number of memories that would be lost today if Facebook was canceled forever. Many families today use Facebook to keep memories of their children’s lives as they grow up. Old-style photo albums have given way to digital keepsakes stored in vulnerable computers and digital cameras. Most of those images are now on Facebook. What would you do if suddenly the content of your child’s life was gone?

As you go through Facebook today, take a moment to look for the things that are only on Facebook, like login tools to essential apps, your life’s content, or Facebook groups you depend on, and ask yourself, what would happen if Facebook was forever off?

The problem is not just Facebook going down but a critical component that stores data. For example, yesterday’s outage is suggested to be a technical programming glitch that knocked it offline. What, if instead of the connection, it was something else, like the servers that store all your images? What if a “technical glitch,” or worse, a hacker, destroyed the storage servers, what then?

In technical parlance this is what is known as a single point of failure.

Why It Happened

Although there have been rumors of outages across many platforms like Amazon, the outage was centralized only to Facebook and its dependent apps. The Facebook-dependent apps included WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus, a virtual-reality headset.

Facebook has not said what caused the outage. But the technical evidence suggests that it was a DNS (Domain Name System) problem. Think of the DNS as traffic device directing traffic through the city. In this case, DNS acts as the traffic sign sending your request to visit a webpage towards the direction where the page can be found.

Although the DNS system is robust and has failsafe in place, it appears that Facebook’s attempt to control the internet has driven it towards controlling all aspects of its infrastructure for internet traffic, including the DNS. Instead of relying on the time-tested and robust public DNS system, it appears that Facebook uses its own routing system to manage traffic. It has a created a single point of failure where one broken component crashes the whole system.

Facebook has yet to explain why and how it happened, but the outage shows a continuing pattern of Facebook trying to be the gateway to the Internet by bypassing anyone it doesn’t control.

DNS outages are common and the system reacts by rerouting traffic around trouble spots. To do so it depends on other systems to bypass the broken links. Facebook’s traffic was wholly dependent on its own infrastructure.

What It Cost

Facebook users may be tempted to think that the Facebook outage was just an inconvenience. The reality is that it cost many businesses. In its quest to become the gateway to the internet, Facebook has become the only business outlet for many small businesses. Many small companies use Facebook as their storefront. Many others use Facebook as their communications platform for handling sales calls and customer support.

Messenger, a Facebook-owned communications platform, was down as well, isolating many small businesses from their customers and employees. Facebook, wanting to be the gateway to the internet, has positioned its Messenger service as the tool for virtual classes and online medical services and many other essential services dependent on efficient communications.

And its not just the United States. In México, politicians were isolated from their constituents as Facebook has come to be the platform of choice for Mexico’s political engagement. The outage of WhatsApp, a communications platformed owned by Facebook affected non-profit organizations working in countries like Colombia where victims of gender violence had limited access to support organizations helping them.

Facebook’s own employees were unable to get much work done because their own internal systems were down as well. If Facebook employees couldn’t work because of the failure, what does that say about the rest of the workers dependent on the Facebook tools to get work done? It is also likely the reason why Facebook took so long to get back online because Facebook engineers couldn’t communicate efficiently enough to ask the simple question, “what happened?”

The Gateway To The Internet

Facebook’s strategy is simply. It wants to be the gateway to the internet. It wants to be the platform you wake up to and stay on until you go to sleep at night. To achieve this goal, it needs to become the gateway you use to be updated about the lives of your family and friends, to be your central source of your daily news and information and to become the platform you use to do business.

Facebook’s official statement about the outage betrays its strategy of becoming central to your internet experience when it wrote, “we know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected.”

It has achieved critical mass with its billions of users, but it faces a problem it fully recognizes, the lack of growth from future generations. The kids are just not into Facebook like the adults are. Former Facebook employee and now whistleblower, Frances Haugen has said as much by exposing how Instagram, another Facebook property, knows that it is detrimental to the mental wellbeing of teenagers because of the body-shaming it promotes. Coincidently, Haugen identified herself only hours before the Facebook outage.

The Wall Street Journal has been publishing a series dubbed the Facebook Files. It has exposed how Facebook has known for years that Instagram mentally harms teenage girls. Facebook has denied the charges but it also refuses to release the documents alleging the studies it conducts into the detrimental effects of its growth strategies. What we know comes from Frances Haugen who has leaked the internal documents.

The scandal of Cambridge Analytica exposed Facebook’s role in the recent global political turmoil. The leaked documents suggest that Facebook understands its part in the mental health issues, particularly of teenagers, vaccine hesitancy and the significant part it plays in the rise of “fake news”. Facebook depends on the negativity it causes to keep growing is what the leaked documents suggest.

Learn From Your Teenagers

Yesterday’s Facebook outage affected mostly adults. Teenagers were happily connected through text messaging and chat apps like Snapchat. Not many teenagers realized that Facebook was down. There is a lesson to be learned from there. Many teenagers were not aware that Facebook was down because they are not dependent on Facebook as their central gateway to staying in touch with friends. Teenagers are fickle social media users. Yesterday it was TikTok and today it is Snapchat. Tomorrow it may be something new for the teenagers. Teenagers are flexible social users who adopt new technology as it changes. And Facebook knows this.

Facebook has been trying to bring into its platform young children for years because it understands that to be the internet of things it needs to bring in the children to make them dependent on Facebook. It’s the same idea that drug peddlers use on children by giving them a free taste to make them customers for whatever life their drug-dependent life’s last.

Disclaimer: The author has developed and is managing FUNatical.me, a social media platform.