


What does the outage demonstrate about Facebook’s size and influence? “The outage came the same day Facebook asked a federal judge that that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services,” the Associated Press reported, even as the brief disappearance of Facebook showed that “nothing can easily replace the social network that over the past 17 years has effectively evolved into critical infrastructure.”.Owners of small businesses were also disrupted everywhere from India to Ireland. Who was hurt? The outage affected potentially tens of millions of users worldwide.But Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have offered no public explanation for what exactly went wrong, just a blanket apology for the disruption. Who’s responsible? Outside security experts said they believed the server problem that caused a six-hour global outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could have only originated from within the company.Now that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are coming back into service, after a dramatic global outage, we’re wrapping up our live coverage of the outage.īut there are still many questions unanswered, about what caused the outage, what effects the service disruption had for the at least 3.5bn people who use Facebook’s apps around the world, and what the consequences of the outage will be as Facebook faces increasing public pressure over its impact on everything from US teens’ body image to the survival of democracies around the world.
