The massive global Facebook social media outage is likely to see the company lose a number of users according to technology expert Arthur Goldstuck.
Facebook has experienced a lapse of network coverage which has seen applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram grinding to a halt. Users across the globe have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration.
Goldstuck on the outage:
Goldstuck says Facebook has remained silent about what is causing the disruption of services.
“The outrage is palpable, especially if you look at comments on other social networks like Twitter. There has been a campaign for a while for people to quit Facebook. That has picked up momentum as a result of this outage. In our recent study called the SA Social Media landscape, we found that of South Africans aged between 16 and 64, who use the internet, 94% are using WhatsApp, 84% are using Facebook, Instagram comes in at about 70%. A vast majority of internet using South Africans are dependant on these applications for their communication.”
Facebook shares
The disruption, which hit Facebook’s platforms minutes before noon, comes a day after a whistleblower accused the firm of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower after the weekend’s whistleblower report and slipped further to trade down 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday. They were on track for their worst day in nearly a year, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday.
Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System (DNS). Facebook itself controls the relevant settings.
DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
Security experts tracking the situation said the outage likely was triggered by a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable. That could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.
Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage. – additional reporting by Reuters
