When people start texting in droves again, you know something is up. During last night’s major Facebook outage, KPN customers sent twice as many text messages as normal; at ten o’clock in the evening even four times as much as normal. Call traffic also increased, reports the telecom provider.
What KPN does not report is what the SMS traffic looked like this morning. We are probably all using WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook again, despite the inconvenience of the outage.
In previous outages, as well as when Facebook took over WhatsApp, competitors saw many new signups – but most people have remained loyal users of Facebook services until now. We simply depend on it, to a greater or lesser extent: in the Netherlands mainly for our family and friends chats and holiday snaps, but in other countries for much more.
It is no coincidence that one failure affects so many people: it is because Facebook has managed to gain a lot of market share with a sophisticated strategy. “The internet was conceived as a decentralized place, but Facebook is the prime example of the opposite,” said Evelyn Austin, director of digital civil rights movement Bits of Freedom.
Traditionally, the internet has been decentralized: anyone can email to anyone, and any web page can link to any other web page. But internet companies prefer to keep you in their own environment, their own walled garden, their ‘inner garden’. The more services they offer, the better they can do it. Facebook is not alone in this: companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon are also investing in this.
“The company has built a very centralized infrastructure with walled gardens where users are more or less held hostage, it’s hard to get out of that,” Austin says. After all, WhatsApp users can only communicate with other WhatsApp users, not users of other apps. The same goes for Instagram and Facebook users.
The problem at Facebook had to do with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which holds the internet together. It is unclear what exactly went wrong, but all digital references to Facebook had disappeared from the BGP. This is how the BGP works:
At the same time, the impact of the outage in the Netherlands was not too bad. That was partly because it happened at the end of the workday and users have plenty of other ways to communicate. This was also noticeable: people spontaneously became active on alternative chat apps such as Signal and Telegram – or started texting.
“It was irritating and fascinating at the same time,” says Jasper Schilder, editor-in-chief at marketing agency The Best Social. “You have to reschedule just about everything that was planned for the next day. But you know that things like this can happen. That’s the funny side of this: you notice that the internet responds immediately with funny memes and people going to post what they’re eating on LinkedIn.”
In other countries, however, the dependence on Facebook is a lot greater than here. In Brazil, for example, where companies use WhatsApp for orders (see box at the top of the story). But also in India and Myanmar, for example, where ‘Facebook’ is synonymous with ‘the internet’. WhatsApp has 390 million users in India.
Government intervention
Evelyn Austin advocates government intervention, such as breaking up Facebook. Something the American regulator FTC also prefers. “Of course that doesn’t solve everything,” Austin says. “But it will give Facebook new motivation to compete more with other parties and that will provide better services.”