By Vanessa BouZeid | Staff Writer
Your reliance or dependence on a service or product is only apparent when that same commodity is unexpectedly stripped away from you. A lesson the whole world learned on the 5th of October as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, shut down for six consecutive hours causing a mass social media blackout.
For some, this shutdown was just a minor inconvenience, where phones stopped buzzing and notifications disappeared. Others indifferently resorted to other social media platforms such as Twitter or communicated via email to inquire about what’s going on. Yet, for a number it meant profit loss and , where owners were left rattled and disrupted.
So, what was the reason behind this shut down? What was its impact? What does this tell us about society’s dependence on virtual platforms?
The internet can be seen as an international train station with billions of intertwining paths leading to different destinations, or in our case, different service routers. In order for the trains, which represent the data, to reach their specified servers, companies use a mechanism called Border Gateway Protocol, also referred to as BGP, to set the data route and coordinate network traffic. It seems that a faulty configuration change occurred between Facebook and the BGP. This resulted in the information data of the former to appear inexistent as servers around the world failed to find it. In an instantaneous domino effect, WhatsApp and Instagram followed suit, since they share the same servers as Facebook, causing a virtual black out.
This outage sent the world spinning in a blind whirl as communication completely cut off with no prior notice. According to The Guardian some businesses lost nearly an entire day’s worth of work as the crash lasted throughout all business hours. These three apps have created an ecosystem of digital communication where their usage transcends their initial purpose. By cutting these informal technologies, businesses that rely on these free messaging services, – especially in developing nations such as Lebanon – were rendered powerless, as their only means of reach have been breached.
In addition to the crash’s economic drawbacks, individuals were left anxious and disoriented, trying to access these different platforms repeatedly in vain. This comes unsurprisingly, since as social creatures we invest a major part of our energy on human interactions and relationships. Additionally, coming-out of a two-year pandemic, digital presence gained a new sense of validity and a more solidified kind of legitimacy. Reliance on social networks to consume information and carry out daily chores is at an all time high. Thus, chaos and disarray are anticipated when the main channels of interaction cease to function, and people are left literally and metaphorically disconnected.
Following this global incident, the world realized the false image painted around these tech giants. At the end of the day, they are not immune to faulty configurations, crashes, and software errors. This blackout also reflected the reliance of today’s community on digital networks. These services represent some peoples’ main or only source of income, as well as a form of escapism and comfort, a hub for socialites to remain plugged in. Knowing a little bit of everything all the time unconsciously became an internalized part of our daily routine, thus, its momentary disappearance ‘paralyzed’ the globe. Some were left anxious, needing to feel connected again while others felt relieved, taking it as a break from the outside world. Nonetheless, the impact was significant, and it remains to the eye of the beholder to classify this dependence as a negative or a positive.