My Word: Facebook outage and outrage

• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Author: LIAT COLLINS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

On Monday or Tuesday, depending on your time zone, the entire Facebook empire came to an uncanny halt: No Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger. The company later blamed a "faulty configuration change." That's not so comforting. Big Tech owns – and trades in – vast amounts of personal data. It's uncomfortable to think that someone could carelessly pull the plug on our virtual lives. Actually, everything about social media feels increasingly uncomfortable.

The Facebook outage came the same week as former employee Frances Haugen shared allegations that the company deliberately ignored warning signals that it was polarizing society and causing other social ills, preferring to place profits above positive social values.

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None of this should come as a shock. The last thing Facebook deserves this week is its ubiquitous thumbs-up emoticon.

When the system went down, I acted like most of my friends – real and social-media friends. First, I checked my phone and WiFi several times before thinking to Google the situation. Then I sent an SMS (remember them?) to those I thought should know about the outage before they found out they could not get in touch the usual way and panicked.

It felt a bit like the sinking feeling I get when I forget my phone at home and immediately want to call everyone in my contact list to tell them. It's irrational; but then again, so is our dependency on mobile phones and messaging systems – to the extent that it's hard to remember the phone numbers of our nearest and dearest, numbers we once knew by heart.

When contact was finally restored, I enjoyed the memes and comments that were quickly shared. Twitter, Telegram and TikTok, I realized, had a bonanza of creativity while Facebook's platforms were down. Comedian Allen Strickland Williams (@TotallyAllen), for example, tweeted "More like the Social Notwork," referring to the movie The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook.

I made a mental note to rewatch a different movie on Netflix: The Social Dilemma. The docu-drama reveals social media's darkest secrets in a more riveting way than Haugen's testimony: How they can manipulate political thought and encourage users to remain online far longer than people intended and how they can ruin self-esteem, sometimes with tragic consequences, particularly for teens. The fact that we...