Facebook and Google’s service disruptions highlight the problem of our digital dependence

There were a few unusual things about Facebook’s huge outage yesterday, and they point to a much larger problem for us all.

Facebook and Google’s service disruptions highlight the problem of our digital dependence. Picture: Thibault Camus

If you listened quietly yesterday, you could hear the collective cries of Instagram influencers everywhere wondering where their next meal was coming from.

Social media users around the world were left to cope without the positive affirmation that comes from people liking their posts when Facebook’s suite of apps went down for hours yesterday.

The network disruption affected Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, causing users to seriously freak out.

The outage was unusual in its duration, lasting about eight hours and reminding us all of a time before we were inundated with a constant stream of our friend’s baby photos.

Downdetector, a site that tracks network outages on popular online services, said it was the biggest disruption it had ever witnessed.

“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Downdetector co-founder Tom Sanders said in a statement.

“Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large-scale outage.”

Despite initial conspiracy theories that hackers were to blame, the reality seems far more benign.

In the last 12 hours, YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Facebook and Instagram have gone down or been so incapacitated they did not work properly.

This cannot be a coincidence. Are we under hack attack? #facebookdown

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 13, 2019

Early this morning, Facebook blamed the fiasco on a problems arising from a change in its servers.

“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” the company posted on Twitter.

“We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

As the chaos unfolded over on Twitter, the company was quick to reject speculation the problem was the result of a denial-of-service attack — a type of cyberattack that overloads the host of a service with superfluous requests.

Facebook’s problems came the day after Google experienced major issues with its services including Google Drive and Gmail, causing many workplaces to grind to a halt.

It’s a reminder of how utterly dependent we are on the digital stalwarts of Silicon Valley and could add fuel to the fire in the ongoing debate about whether they should be broken up.

A former senior Facebook employee, senior US politicians including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and major media companies including News Corp Australia, the publisher of this website, have advocated for Google and Facebook to be broken up due to their stranglehold on the delivery of digital news and online ad revenue.

The day will henceforth be known as Black Thursday. Picture: Jenny Kane