On Monday, October 4th, 2021, there was a social media outage. Facebook Inc's services went off for about 6 hours. This outage was one of the longest ever recorded in history. Facebook received 10.6 million, worldwide, complaints due to it. Once the problem was dealt with, all the apps went back to working faster than ever. Mark Zuckerberg commented "I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about." and then apologized for the outage. Mark Zuckerberg lost $6 billion due to the outage, depriving him of the 'Richest man in the world" title. Facebook Inc shares also went down by 4.9% on the same day as the outage.
People and businesses worldwide were affected by this service. Facebook apologized for the disconnect and said it was due to a network issue. Facebook's direct quote was "faulty configuration change". This six-hour outage affected small businesses, bloggers, students, e-commerce, and essential communication. Some small businesses reported a loss in revenue as they struggled to get in touch with clients, while others have started to rethink their marketing strategies.
Facebook Inc's services went down for all the apps which include WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Facebook is slowly growing and becoming a social media monopoly. What we witnessed on Monday was one of the biggest consequences of monopolies. It was not just one social media app that went down. Snapchat and Twitter were the only other commonly used app that people were able to communicate on. This is why monopolies are troublesome for societies. Do you think that Facebook is growing into a social media monopoly? What other repercussions can occur due to this?
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-experiencing-outage-11633363936
8 comments:
After the loss it has faced due to the outage Facebook Inc will definitely be looking to grow more business to make up for what they lost. However, I do not think that Facebook will become a social media monopoly. Facebook Inc has some of the most popular social media apps but other apps also exist that are not as popular. When Facebook Inc apps shut down consumers shifted to Snapchat and Twitter. Though there was a lot of confusion it was easy for consumers to make the shift. With social media apps there is always low consumer loyalty as consumers tend to jump on what's new. Facebook Inc apps with time will loose its relevance as more apps will come into being.
I think there is no doubt that Facebook is growing into a social media monopoly. I do not think that they will ever completely be a monopoly, but they already are the most powerful social media giant out there. They have so much money that they have been able to buy large companies out with very little issue such as Instagram which they bought out for 1 billion dollars in 2012. You can clearly see the issue with having one company controlling such a large portion of the media. A lot of time when a social media platform goes down you think about yourself and do not know what to do with your time instead. The part, like you mentioned, that no one thinks about is how it affects the business that relies on it for marketing, sales, and communication in their daily tasks. Let's be honest though, we all need more than just 6 hours of a break from social media.
I don't necessarily think Facebook is a monopoly in the United States and many developed parts of the world. There are a handful of social media platforms that users can use such as Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok to name a few.
Where it gets murky is their expansion into undeveloped regions of the world where Facebook might be the only platform available to people. In these cases, Facebook has had a record of aggressively expanding to corner off these markets. Especially with the proven danger of the Facebook platform, it can be disruptive to have this social media giant infiltrate their daily lives.
Not only do I think that Facebook is becoming a social media monopoly, but also the impact of this social media titan is greater than we think. With firsthand data recording people's behavior and speech, Facebook could easily manipulate society both economically and politically by exploiting biases in human brains. For example, there are more and more voices questioning if Facebook could influence the election result. Well, the Republican party was spending $1,000,000 PER DAY on influencing voters on Facebook alone. That tells you something.
Facebook is definitely becoming a social media monopoly. They own so much of what we use today and so they also have control over what we see and learn every day. They have the ability to change narratives, spread fake news, influence the way people vote, or choose to vaccinate themselves. This much influence over people's actions can be used for good but can also be exploited. Another interesting thing related to the social media outage was a tweet that I saw that mentioned that Facebook lost millions of dollars due to the outage, but no one knows who Facebook lost that money to or where it went.
There is absolutely no doubt that Facebook is becoming a social media monopoly, and will continue to exert this control over the market because the number of apps it owns. Instagram, WhatsApp (2 other extremely used apps worldwide) are also owned by Facebook and all 3 of these apps going down was a huge deficit within peoples lives. It not only showed how they monopolize social media, but also the negative effects of it mentally, and the fragility of the nature of this market.
Jack Doresey with twitter and Snapchat itself is really the last of the main social media platforms not owned by Facebook. The addition of Instagram was huge for Facebook as their market share grew immensely as a result. I would say that the majority of young adults use snapchat, twitter, facebook and instagram daily. Speaking that Facebook owns 1/2 of the market you can see how their monopoly is forming. They have a crazy amount of money backing them which could enable them to go after some of their competitors in the future as well creating a massive barrier to entry.
It is not hard to see the difficulties that arise when there are only a few tech giants controlling the media that a lot of people solely rely on. As it has been seen in recent days, Facebook has also been accused of spreading misinformation about Covid and other health topic to exploit advertising opportunities. These accusation will surely be well reviewed, but it goes calls into question the reliance we have as a community on monopolized media platforms.
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