Australian businesses ‘too reliant on Facebook’

Tuesday’s mass outage should serve as a wake up call and not just to Mark Zuckerberg, Australian executives say.

Facebook suffered a mass outage on Tuesday. Picture: Josh Edelson / AFP

Facebook’s outage is a sign that Australian businesses are too reliant on overseas platforms like Facebook, executives say, after the tech giant blamed a faulty configuration change for the disruption that cost Mark Zuckerberg an estimated $8.1bn and sent his shares in his tech giant’s down 5 per cent.

Local businesses to find a way to ween themselves off the likes of Facebook and become more self-sufficient, according to Macquarie Telecom senior adviser Marcus Thompson, a retired army officer and former head of information warfare for the Australian Defence Force.

“Thousands of Australian organisations large and small, commercial enterprises and not-for-profits rely on Facebook to operate and have woken up today with no alternative platform to reach their stakeholders,” Dr Thompson said.

“That this is happening during the pandemic – on the cusp of the easing of restrictions when social media marketing will be critical in helping many businesses bounce back – makes the situation even worse.

“The outage highlights the over-reliance Australian businesses have on international digital platforms and systems. When cyberattacks or other disruptions inevitably strike these international platforms, with no local, sovereign networks, infrastructure or methods to fall back on, we’re at the whim of clean-up and remedial measures taking place half a world away.“

Dr Thompson said that Australia is home to some of the greatest data and security skills in the world, but we don’t leverage them nearly enough.

“Events like this and the recent Fastly outage demonstrate the thin tightrope we’re walking on when we rely on companies in other countries for critical digital services and infrastructure.”

The outages also highlight that even the world’s largest tech giants can experience difficulties, according to Localsearch co-founder and chairman Daniel Stoten, who is encouraging small businesses to be multi-approached with their marketing efforts.

“This outage is proof you can’t have all your eggs in one basket,” he said.

“As systems look to be restored for now, we can’t be certain an outage like this won’t happen again. For SMBs, it’s best to be prepared for that by ensuring you have a presence across all social media platforms where your customers are present, while also having an organic Google search presence through SEO optimised content, listing your business using the Google My Business profile tool, a mature email newsletter list, or whatever stream is most relevant to you.

“The proof is in the pudding here – Facebook had to announce the outage on competitor social media network Twitter … even they themselves market across other platforms.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves a meeting with a US senator on Capitol Hill in 2019. Picture: Getty Images

Local businesses have battled through Facebook and Google news bans where businesses were effectively banned on the platform, Mr Stoten said, along with changes to privacy limits and iOS updates restricting advertising opportunities, and continued outages across platforms.

“The scale of these incidents is only growing with time as we all become increasingly reliant on the tech giants. Facebook is a business too, which relies on the same technologies we all do to operate. This means that they too can cease to one day exist.”

Facebook cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

The outage lasted until about 9.30am AEDT, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption and said the company‘s services were gradually coming back online.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Facebook VP of engineering and infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a statement.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

“People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologise to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”