Computer Reliability

There were no explicit themes of computer reliability in the movie. There were no service or computer outages. However, it would be interesting to consider what if there was an outage of a social media site, such as Instagram, in a moment where Kayla is trying to escape from a social situation she does not want to partake in. In the movie, all social media services were available on demand and there were no issues for the teenagers to access them from anywhere. Social media outages have happened in the past. In 2021 Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp were all down for hours [1]. Technical errors can occur and cause outages of services like social media platforms. Sometimes, cyber attacks can be launched to deliberately cause outages. In this specific example, configuration changes in the company routers disrupted the network traffic between data centers. In 2020, four Whatsapp outages occurred and the longest Facebook outage was over a day long in 2019 [1].

The impacts of social media outages can range from minimal to large, as the dependence on social media varies. For instance, small companies depend on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram for advertising of their products and services [1]. There are also entrepreneurs and business people who depend on social media for their work, and social media facilitates business transactions [2]. Facebook also provides a marketplace platform where listings can be posted. 

Facebook also suffered loss of revenue due to outages. In October 2021, a 6-hour long Facebook outage was estimated to cause a loss of “$100 million in revenue” because of a “simple mistake” [3]. So the damages incurred by social media outages span far and wide, from not just the social media companies themselves, but also businesses and entrepreneurs who rely on social media for their livelihoods.

References

[1] “What causes social media outage and what are its impact?,” (Creamer Media Engineering News, 29 August 2022), https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/what-causes-social-media-outage-and-what-are-its-impact-2022-08-29, Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

[2] Matt Swayne, “Outage outrage: Facebook outage may reveal depth of social media dependency,” (The Pennsylvania State University, May 4, 2022), https://www.psu.edu/news/institute-computational-and-data-sciences/story/outage-outrage-facebook-outage-may-reveal-depth/, Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

[3] Alan Brown, “The dangers of social media downtime and its impact on business,” (Elite Business Magazine, February 23, 2022), https://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/sales-marketing/item/the-dangers-of-social-media-downtime-and-its-impact-on-business, Accessed 13. Oct. 2023.