What the Tech? Surviving the Facebook Outage
How did you spend Monday when Facebook and all of its properties crashed?
The outage began at around 10:20 AM CDT and by late in the day, users were still waiting to catch up on posts and post themselves. Without being able to communicate on its own platform, Facebook took to Twitter.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” on Facebook’s official Twitter account @Facebook.
The outage follows a week of bad news for the social media giant. On Sunday, a whistleblower told CBS’ 60 Minutes about her experience working for Facebook and how she witnessed the network pushing negative posts to the front of users’ news feeds, explaining that Facebook learned its users engage more with negative posts and posts that make them angry.
So how will a long-term Facebook and Instagram outage affect people and society in general?
It’s too early to know that but I visited a coffee shop as people learned of the Facebook/Instagram/Messenger and WhatsApp outages.
While a few people seemed worried if not upset, others told me it might actually be a good thing to live without those social networks for a few days.
“I think it would have a positive impact on, not just me but a lot of people,” said 17-year-old Paige Dewitt. She told me she had tried to step away from those two social channels and “just live my life,” but always went back.
” I don’t think it’s something I could completely cut off on my own, so in a way, I would almost be happy if it happened. just to distance myself from that because it can bring a lot of negativity into people’s lives,” she said.
Drew Davis, said while he didn’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, his wife does. “I don’t know, maybe people will actually have to come out and talk to people. Maybe they’ll stop sitting staring at their phones and just talk to people.”
It isn’t just unplugging from social media that could do us some good. With the revelations on 60 Minutes and The Wall Street Journal, maybe stepping away from negative posts which you can barely avoid on social media, it’ll make people less agitated and angry.
Service was eventually restored.
