5 months have passed without posting anything on my blog due to relocation and starting a new job. I'm back again with another social media post. It feels like i will be writing more about this subject in the future as digitalization is more and more involved in out lives. The subject of this post is Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram outage in October 4th 2021. From both technical and philosophical point of view, this issue looks like boiling down to similar outcomes. But first, i would advice you to read the post about Clubhouse before reading this. There were similar deductions in that post too and they were kind of prophecies. Services, needs, products and habits have come together with some sort of algorithm and this turned 6 hours of social media outage into a bir crisis. Like it is some sort of Millenium bug back in the 2000s again. If i can analyze this matter from 2 aspects, technical and sociological, i think i can have some deductions.
Let me begin with the technical aspect first. Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are kind of connected to the same servers or the infrastructure. This makes a central system controlling these three. Even though there are distributed servers, the management of these servers are centralized. Think of it like an octopus with many arms but one brain. A youtube channel called Computerphile explains this infrastructure and shows the dns configurations going offline. For a second there were Facebook and others, and the next, there were none :) It was like the octopus without the brain to use its arms. Video is down below.
The essence of this approach was to increase availability and speed up this process. But since the 3 products are interconnected and they are managed by a central configuration, if an exceptional error happens, all of them will go down together. Of course they can now implement solutions to prevent this from happening again. They can make sure that other products will continue serving in this situation. It would be a couple of routing or DNS configuration at most. The root cause it the approach that resulted in this, the centralization.
Some people say technologies like blockchain can solve these issues. That is havnig individuals adding functionality to the system rather than having reaching the servers from a central location. Unfortunately i don't have enough information to talk about this subject but it seems like a worthy idea to think about.
There was one more side affect of this service outage. There are websites that you can login with your Facebook credentials (oauth), instead of creating a new account there. These are kind of dependant on Facebook too. Or maybe if you are using your Instagram account the connect another website, you may not be able to login there either. Naturally the solution to this problem is to have an account for each website you use but this is a major burden on users. I can't find a middle ground of this situation :)
Long story short, this event is not that much complicated from technical point of view. There was one weird thing while the Facebook and Instagram were gone. I have noticed that Instagram was giving 500 Internal Server Error message during the outage. I was expecting timeout or a kind of not found error. The main purpose of this post is to analyze this matter from sociological and philosophical window. There is a debate going on in USA about why these social medias are monopolistic and they are looking for solutions with anti-trust laws or something. I would say there is another factor in this matter before making laws about it. The user factor...
First, i would support these antitrust laws and i would stand against any kind of corporate entity to become a monopolistic power. No matter what the service or product is. This is like rich becoming richer while making sure poor become poorer. Or like dominating the market with money and leaving no space to others to move or enter. But we are forgetting that these products are derived from services. So my question is: How did these old social medias become giant entities or like a small multinational country these days?
Let me begin from the beginning. If we are talking about Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, we know these applications are not providing new revolutions in the technology field. You were basically posting images, videos and your comments with instant messaging. Of course they can have quality as softwares but their bottom-line service is not space travel you know. Even i can somehow develop a product to provide these functions or another software developer can do that too. So the products are outcomes of the services. I may not be able to provide a very good product but i can do my best. This is the first step.
In the second step, these products compete with each other by implementing new features in their products. This also gives us new habits or routines. I have talked about this in the Clubhouse post months ago :) At first, we were finding old friends in Facebook and this product has taken advantage of this opportunity for years. Whatsapp has reformed out messaging habbits into a brand new way. Instagram has turned into some sort of marketing app from a memory sharing app. The feauters of these products have changed our habits and even daily lives. These app gained the power to manipulate us because of us. Now that is nteresting.
In the third step, it is us again. There are lots of TV and radio channels are connecing Whatsapp lines to their business, receiving messages from Facebook or Instagram, delivering gifts through these social medias. The number or people living their life by product promotions has exploded. We have helped them by clicking on their links. We have nurtured and grew this system. It should have been products being presented to us but now it is us who is presenting ourselves to these products like addicts.
This brings the fourth step. Someone comes up tries to acquire these products to be a monopoly. From the businessmen perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Because you already have customers, addicted or hungry. It is a 100% guaranteed investment. But weren't these just services at the beginning? How did it turned around in 4 steps.This might not have made sense to a lot of people before Facebook going down. But now you can see how many people and their jobs or lives can be affected by 6 ours of social media outage. This was inevitable and bound to happen.
Then what can be the solution? Is it applying new laws to prevent becoming monopolistic entities? Due to the reasons above, i don't think so. Is Zuckerberg forcing us to use these apps? Can these apps survive without their users? I also think not so :) It won't be constructive to declare war against some people making profits with capitalism. You need to change the lives and understandings of the masses of people who feeds them. As i have mentioned in the post about Clubhouse: Maybe we must be doing X in some Y application and use the A application only for B functions ...etc.
But if we try to de-centralize everything, we face with the concept of globalization. For example, if some country decides to use their own social media and isolate themselves from the rest of the world, it wouldn't make sense. Or if there were a douzen alternatives to Instagram, we would be inclined to chose the app with the biggest influence. This turns into a dilemma. Just like forcing you to use a new account in every single website, too much alternatives might result in a useless pile of apps. That is why it is hard to come up with an ideal solution to this.
But i can tell you this crystal clear. Our lifestyles and understandings have to change somehow. If this continues, we will be strengthening the hands of the market opportunitists. We are looking for ways to earn easy-money. If there happens to be an alternative to Facebook or Instagram one day, they will be aiming to take advantage of this system. Not to stand against monopolization or to provide us better services. Let me mark my words here so that i can say i told you so :)
Lastly, even though here is not the place, i should say the we must think about who supports or covers these social media giants. We must think about who are benefiting from these products. It may not be just a coincidence that some of these giant products that we are hearing a lot about, taking huge parts in our lives. After all, we are talking about platforms that can give enough influence to conduct social engineering in all around the world. This is another subject partially filled with conspiracies. It is a question of "are we using them or are they using us".
Usually the last paragraph of my posts explains the title :) We used to find our childhood friends in Facebook back then. Then we started to share verything there like mannerless people. Then we normalized it with Instagram. People who make their living by advertising created prosperity there and it attracted others. We were already using Whatsapp for messaging, instead of just calling. This became one of the few defacto ways to stay in touch. We have also established our work on top of it. And Zuckerberg gathered all these under one roof. This is not a crime, after all, some people willingly sold these apps to Facebook. We were talking about products, instead of services. Now we are dependant on both services and products. Creators of Whatsapp and Instagram fueled this process by selling their apps.
So we came to these days. We have centralized the products that must have been just for social media. And its 1 day of outage should not have been a big deal. Don't get this the wrong way, i am not opposed to these products growing in this digital age. But these apps have been subjected to monopolization. Let's face it, we did this. See you at the next post :)
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