Possible Reasons Why The Facebook Ecosystem Went Down Just A Day After Whistleblower Interview

The Facebook ecosystem is down and that’s talking the main app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus all of which Facebook either bought or created outrightly.

About 4 hours ago, millions of users across the world began reporting outages on all Facebook platforms and as usual, many took to Twitter to share their experiences.
Experts are now saying that this may be Facebook’s worst outage since 2008 and that’s not even considering that this looks like the third this year alone.

This comes just one day after whisteblower and former staff Frances Haugen said 3^rd of October 2021 that she’s in fact the one who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement against Facebook and has decided to break her silence. She leaked documents to both The Wall Street Journal and United States Congress. She is also billed to testify that Facebook executives knew all along about the dangers of Instagram to young people and have paid little attention to it. She went on to say that the company’s algorithm is indeed engineered to spread misinformation.

The big question on everyone’s mind is when we would know exactly what happened. You see as a company that collects data from the public, they are obliged to inform us but whether they would be transparent about it is a question for another day. Facebook has been accused of lack of transparency in the past and has been accused of not reporting breaches to the authorities on time.

We don’t expect to know what would cause all applications to go down at the same time. But a big theory would be that as Facebook increasingly tries to merge core services like chats across its platforms, each platform would be increasingly dependent on the other and as such would require some kind of shared infrastructure for a good handshake among platforms. This means that if that shard infrastructure goes down, it all comes down with it and that’s a problem. We had reported recently that an upgrade of last year’s announcement by Facebook of synchronisation between Facebook messenger chats and Instagram chats, will offer users the leverage to initiate group chats while having the opportunity to add Instagram and Messenger contacts. A synchronised group chat scenario would also require a share infrastructure to handle that complex process for a seamless flow.

It could also be a security breach. I very much think though that they’ll try hard to make it not about this should this be the case. Maybe a DDoS attack. Maybe an attack by the notorious Russian, Chinese or North Korean hackers. This could very much be the issue as users are reporting that services like Gmail from Google, Snapchat and even some portions of Twitter are experiencing slight outages too. If this is the case, then the United States government could step in and possibly retaliate. Remember when North Korean hackers attacked Sony Pictures during the Obama administration in November 2014 and the the US government later retaliated by causing some kind of power outage or so ? Well that could very well happen again because of the magnitude of this outage. But that’s if a hack was the cause. 

How about it just being a connectivity issue. This is less likely though as Facebook has a well connected network of data centres that can perform other functions should one be down. It is also not feasible that all major data centres would go down at the same time. Data centre connectivity cannot just go down at all seven locations.

Well it could be Facebook trying to deflect attention from the 60 Minutes interview making the rounds alleging all these big things about them. 

I guess we won’t know at this time but you know how it is, eventually we’ll know. It can’t stay hidden for too long.