Facebook sparks outrage over downtime on socials

By Cayni Sheeqow and Aisha Yusuf 11th October 2021

Facebook, as well as its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram suffered one of the largest and widespread outages in its history last week, on October 4, 2021. A shocking 3.5 billion people were affected, which is around half the current population of earth. Facebook claims the mass outage was triggered by an engineer command that inadvertently disconnected its services and knocked them offline, however the fact remains that millions of people were left unable to contact others on the most popular messaging service worldwide, and businesses selling on Instagram and Facebook marketplace’s profits were impacted.

Even amidst Facebooks growing importance, many people are quite unaware of the shady history behind Facebooks creation. Facebooks predecessor, Facemash, was created by Mark Zuckerberg for him to download women's photos from the Harvard student directory without their consent, and upload online to a ratings website. Zuckerberg did not receive any form of punishment and he went on to create what we now know as Facebook.

It must be questioned how we have come to rely on a website created for quite an uncomfortable purpose. Mark Zuckerburg now has an estimated net worth of 118.1 billion, yet is seen by many as a most manipulative and cunning man and has been accused of putting profit over people.

The question remains, should we put our trust into other extremely powerful conglomerates? I think not.