Social Media Outages

By Ellie C. ‘24

On Monday, October 4, 2021 at 11:40 a.m., the world fell into a panic. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus stopped working. This anxiety-inducing outage lasted over six hours, impacting everyone from CEOs of high-profile corporations to teens at The Bryn Mawr School. 

In a blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s Vice-President of infrastructure, wrote that the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers.” Similarly, a Facebook employee explained that the problem erupted from the Domain Name System, a place where the computers themselves look up individual websites. This issue left users with error messages and Facebook employees in utter chaos. Employees experienced internal communication issues, trouble with calls, emails, their primary work app, and even their digital badges stopped working, leaving them unable to perform their jobs. However, this is not the first instance where Facebook has been in trouble. 

Two years ago in 2019, all of Facebook’s apps became mostly inaccessible for over 14 hours due to a technical error. Moreover, in 2008, an internal bug caused the site to go offline for about a day. While the 2008 Facebook outage was significantly longer than the one in 2021, Facebook currently has a much larger platform of users. Approximately 2.89 billion people use Facebook and its apps, including those who depend on them to make a living. During the week of the most recent outage, the corporation was under fire because one of its whistle-blowers revealed that the company prioritized its benefits over ensuring the safety of the media.

In 2021, businesses such as food-delivery companies who take orders online, or companies that promote their products via social media, suffered a grave loss. For instance, Samir Munir, the owner of a food-delivery service in Delhi, could not reach and fulfill orders through his Facebook page and WhatsApp. Mark Donnelly, the founder of HUH Clothing in Ireland, lost thousands of sales because he uses Facebook and Instagram to reach customers. 

Nevertheless, Mark Zukerberg understood the inconvenience for their users, later posting on Facebook, “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” But, this problem led people to question Facebook’s reputation and its reliability. While it was down, some turned to LinkedIn, Zoom, Discord, and Twitter to communicate. 

Businesses and individuals both rely on social media to stay connected to the world. These social media outages bring to light how dependent society is on the internet to function.