Social Media Giants Blackout - Are you next?

Social Media Giant’s Blackout - Are you next?

By Avalon Siegel
October 7, 2021
8 min

Almost all of us around the globe felt the massive weight of the recent ¨Facebook outage” that left businesses weakened and disabled. It is not only an indicator of our dependency on the social media empire but also how important it is to protect your personal business from imminent danger.

But really what we really should all start wondering is-

If social media giants can have a major blackout, what’s stopping it from happening to you?

Key facts

Users reported seeing error warnings in Facebook’s apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus, around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time on Oct 4th, 2021. Facebook has vanished from the internet in a matter of minutes. 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.

About 3.5 billion people worldwide use the apps. This outage made us realize our heavy reliance on Facebook — and especially its subsidiaries like WhatsApp and Instagram.

Let's break it down

The message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error, Reuters reported. DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies took down multiple websites in July.

This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income.

It didn’t just affect users; it also affected Facebook employees. Employees reported having difficulty making calls from work-issued cell phones and receiving emails from outside the organization. Workplace, Facebook’s internal messaging network, was also shut down, leaving many employees unable to conduct their duties. This left employees no choice but to communicate and interact via other sites, such as LinkedIn and Zoom, as well as Discord chat rooms.

The negative consequences of going completely dark

Facebook of course denies all accounts of ¨foul play” or ¨potential hacking.” Santosh Janardhan, VP of Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook, penned a statement on the company’s website late Monday night apologizing to users and offering an explanation for the widespread outages. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

Janardhan said that Facebook wants to “make clear” that the core cause of the blackouts was due to a “faulty configuration change” on “backbone routers.”

Facebook’s stock continued its recent downward trend by dropping nearly 5% on Monday, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing an estimated $6 billion off of his net worth in the hours following the crash.

If a massive enterprise can have an outage, how can I be safe?

Facebook’s downtime highlights the interconnectivity of the Web. When one service goes down, a wide range of businesses are affected. This is perhaps a learning opportunity for organizations of any size about the importance of securely protecting your data as well as having communications tools independent of Facebook.

Cubed Mobile helps businesses mitigate security and downtime risks and protects them when communication applications go down or if malicious attacks occur. Our system offers you:

A free, internal, encrypted email, chat & communication system which is independent from the large, social media moguls
Affordable international communications outside the organization
Alerts from impending attacks or potential suspicious behavior from employee’s phones
The ease of migrating workspaces from employees who leave the company
VPN and so much more…

Come speak with us and find out how Cubed Mobile can be your savior the next time a blackout occurs.