Facebook Down: $160 Million Damage Every Hour
On the evening of March 5, Meta's social networking services including Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram lost connection on a large scale, possibly globally. Although it only lasted about 1 hour (from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Vietnam time), the DownDetector website reported that about 500,000 Facebook users reported account crashes and were unable to log back in. Similar error reports also appeared with Messenger and Instagram, with 10,000 and 50,000 respectively.
Because it happened outside of business hours and late at night in Vietnam, domestic experts assessed that the incident did not cause too much impact on work and economic activities. Instead, it only disrupted users' entertainment and connection needs because during this time, most people spend their time resting, and only a few are still working.
However, it is undeniable that the hour-long incident has an impact on the business and trading activities taking place on this platform at the time of the incident. In particular, the product promotion service will be affected first through a reduction in interaction levels as well as traffic to the target address or product, directly causing a decrease in sales while the amount spent on advertising is still "bitten" (deducted from the advertiser's account).
The user's Facebook account was blank and the login session ended on the evening of March 5.
According to technology site Mashable, small businesses and retailers were the first to be affected by the Facebook outage. "My sales dropped by a quarter," Lucy Jeffrey, founder of bamboo socks, told Mashable. The incident also made Lucy realize that she needed to review her business operations to reduce her dependence on the platform, especially when all of her advertising budget was focused on the world's largest social network.
NetBlocks, an online monitoring and internet governance organization, once estimated that every hour Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram were down would cause about $160 million in damage to the global economy because transactions and trade were suspended during this time. In addition, the inability to connect buyers and sellers also caused many consequences.
After this incident occurred, Meta shares - Facebook's parent company, decreased by 1.6%, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg's assets "evaporated" by 2.8 billion USD.
Find ways to reduce dependence
Like Lucy, many Vietnamese people, when looking back at their panic during the time they could not access Facebook or Messenger, also realized that it was time to reduce their dependence on this platform. With the habit of sharing too much information on Facebook, many people have expressed concern about the risk of cyber attacks and data theft when they suddenly find their accounts "out".
Manh Quan (Hanoi) said he was worried that his account would be hacked and used to scam friends and relatives, but not worried that it would be deleted. "I have tried many times to reduce my dependence on this platform, switching to other messaging applications such as Telegram, Viber, iMessage... Messenger is still used for main communication and exchange, but I always have a backup plan, and Facebook has been removed from my main phone for a long time," Quan shared.
As for Ms. Thanh Hoan (Hanoi), losing Facebook will cause many problems. "My customers mainly close orders via Facebook. Many regular customers often accumulate several orders to pay at once. I lost sleep worrying about losing my Facebook account, not knowing how I would sell or do business. When I calmed down this morning, I also had to consider switching to Zalo as a backup, lest I encounter a similar problem and lose both customers and money," Ms. Hoan shared.
During the time Facebook was down, many Vietnamese people also turned to popular OTT applications such as Zalo and Telegram to communicate with friends or continue working. This shows that many people have switched and expanded their connection tools to avoid dependence and focus on a single platform.
Some of Meta's services have experienced outages in the past, most notably in October 2021, when it affected users globally for more than seven hours. Meta later explained that the problem stemmed from an incorrect setting on the main routers that coordinate traffic between Facebook's data centers, causing the company's services to stop working. Meta is likely to publish a report explaining the cause of the problem soon.
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