Last updated on October 14th, 2024 at 10:53 am
Facebook’s recent outage on 4th October 2021 disrupted many lives and businesses worldwide. It led to many questioning the world’s single reliance on one company that owns and operates so many applications used by billions of people daily. Moreover, many also wondered if we could have avoided such an outage.
This article talks about Facebook’s recent outage, how it happened, and discusses how blockchain technology could have prevented it.
Let’s dive in!
Facebook Outage – What Went Down?
On the 4th of October, 2021, Facebook and its family of applications, Instagram and WhatsApp, were unreachable for hours, disrupting a critical communications platform used by billions and demonstrating how reliant the world has become on a firm under severe scrutiny.
Users reported seeing error warnings in Facebook’s apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time. Within no time, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The interruption lasted more than five hours until several apps progressively came back online, though the business warned that it would take time for the services to recover.
Changes to Facebook’s underlying internet infrastructure, which handles traffic between its data centers, was the issue, the company claimed late the same day. According to the corporation, this disrupted communications and spread to other data centers, bringing the company’s services to a halt.
Even inside Facebook, many problems unfolded. Workers had to scramble since their internal systems had failed. According to an internal message sent to staff and published with The New York Times, the company’s global security team “was notified of a system failure affecting all Facebook internal systems and tools.” Security systems, an internal calendar, and scheduling tools were among the items mentioned in the memo. Workers faced many other problems:
- Employees reported having difficulty making calls on business-issued cell phones and receiving emails from people outside the company.
- Workplace, Facebook’s internal messaging network, was also shut down, leaving many employees unable to conduct their duties.
- Other sites, such as LinkedIn and Zoom, and Discord chat rooms, were used by some to interact.
- Because their digital credentials had stopped working, some Facebook employees who had returned to work at the office could not enter buildings and conference rooms.
- Because they couldn’t get to server locations, security engineers stated they couldn’t assess the outage.
According to three people familiar with the situation, Facebook’s service was eventually restored when a team gained access to its server machines at a data center in Santa Clara, California. They were able to reset them after that.
The company expressed regret for the outage. “We’re sorry,” the company wrote on Twitter when its apps were made available again.
Although technology outages are regular, having so many apps from the world’s top social media firm go black at the same time was rare. Facebook’s most recent major outage occurred in 2019, when a technical issue paralyzed its sites for 24 hours, serving as a reminder that a mishap may cripple even the most powerful internet corporations.
However, Facebook and its network of applications are not like just any other app. It has built itself into a linchpin platform that is regularly used by people worldwide for messaging, live streaming, virtual reality, and many other digital services. An outage of such a network of applications has far-reaching consequences. In many countries like India, Facebook is believed to be synonymous with the internet. Moreover, it is used by more than 3.5 billion people worldwide.
The impact of the outage was much broader than just affecting the communication between friends and family. For example, many businesses rely on Facebook for their digital marketing and outreach efforts and, as a result, had to suffer significant losses. Moreover, many other apps and services use Facebook to sign in, resulting in unintended consequences such as users being unable to access shopping websites or their smart TVs, thermostats, and other internet-connected gadgets.
How Blockchain Could’ve Helped
Facebook’s security engineers stated that they couldn’t access the outage as they couldn’t get to the server locations. Facebook’s services were only restored when a team was able to gain access to its server machines at a data center in Santa Clara, California. This shows that if Facebook had a decentralized network of servers instead of a single server at a particular location that controls the entire network and thus acts as a single point of failure, it could have prevented this outage.
The process of distributing functions and power away from a central place or authority is known as decentralization. It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify a single point of authority in a decentralized architecture. The World Wide Web was designed as a decentralized platform from the start. Blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum show decentralized architectures and systems.
Decentralization can help to mitigate sources of weakness in systems when single actors are overly reliant. Systemic failures could result from these flaws, such as inability to provide promised services or inefficient service due to resource exhaustion, recurrent outages, bottlenecks, a lack of appropriate incentives for adequate service, or corruption.
The decentralized nature of blockchain technology is intrinsic. Blockchain-supported technologies can promote decentralized coordination and alignment of human incentives on a wide scale. Companies are currently centralized, with one small team and a tiny set of servers handling all operations for a large network, leaving them vulnerable, as are the consumers who use such services. Services created on the blockchain, on the other hand, are significantly more robust to outages since they don’t have a single point of failure. Thanks to this technology, we can now recruit a worldwide network of servers rather than relying on a single server or group of individuals.
In Conclusion…
- Of course, blockchain technology isn’t going to be a solution for all of society’s problems. No single tool or technology will ever be able to do so. However, if it is widely adopted, it may address some of the issues similar to the ones that Facebook has recently faced.
So, what are your thoughts on Facebook’s recent outage? Do you think using blockchain technology could have helped prevent this issue?
Comment below and let us know what you think!
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