Facebook disappeared from the Internet for six hours in early October. The websites and apps were not just unavailable, they seemed completely removed. For those who think they are at the forefront of digital progress, however, the failure of the network and the connected services was just further evidence of how obsolete Facebook is actually long ago.
It was often said that no one noticed anything about the disappearance of the platform. Also very popular is the joke that the so-called boomers, haha, could no longer share their vaccination conspiracy theories with each other. Instagram? A single pastel purgatory of the vanities! Well, the failure of Whatsapp was a bit of a nuisance. But nothing that you couldn’t get by with other services. Some even resorted to SMS and felt pretty nostalgic. Either way, however, one is clearly better off without the company and its trades.
The failure this time did not happen out of sinister motives, but simply out of inability
If securities are no longer available, it is always revealed who has privileges – and who does not. For a large number of the nearly three billion Facebook users worldwide, the disintegration of Facebook made itself much more fundamentally noticeable than just a little less conspiracy content. Because for this multitude, Facebook has long since become a synonym for the Internet. In countries like Brazil, Kenya or Malaysia, more than 90 percent of the population use Whatsapp. In more and more countries, the company’s apps have long since become indispensable for retail, healthcare or the basic functioning of administration. Doctors could no longer reach their patients. Local retailers no longer offer their goods, municipalities no longer inform their citizens.
Since 2013, the company has been offering free access to selected web services under the brand name Internet.org – later renamed Free Basics – in cooperation with local cell phone operators. What Mark Zuckerberg and his apologists wanted to sell back then as a noble act of philanthropy, critics saw more as “digital colonialism”. The fact that Facebook’s own products were on offer was more likely to be swept under the carpet. The initiative violates net neutrality, and ultimately the group presumes to decide which services are part of the Internet and which are not.
It is dangerous for the group to also take care of critical infrastructures
For example, a newly released app called Facebook Discover last year. It should also enable low-threshold internet access, but according to a study it repeats the mistakes of its predecessors: To save data, Discover removes video and audio streaming as well as images. This gives users free access to a stripped-down version of any website. However, the researchers found that Facebook was fully accessible through Discover. The group invoked a “technical error”.
Ironically, just a few days after the total failure, Facebook’s chief technology officer went to the press and announced how successful the company was in networking the world. The efforts include around thousands of kilometers of deep-sea cables or a spider-like robot that automatically lays fiber-optic connections along above-ground power lines. All of this serves at least in equal parts to expand market shares as well as a higher good. But if the company does not get the already pressing problems solved, then perhaps it should not necessarily provide critical infrastructures. Even if the failure this time did not happen out of sinister motives, but simply out of inability.