COMMENTARY: Facebook’s outage proves Elizabeth Warren right: It’s time to break up Big Tech – By Amanda Marcotte (Salon) / Oct 5 2021
It’s suddenly a lot harder to deny the negative impacts of Facebook’s anti-competitive practices
The timing couldn’t have been more dramatic when Facebook and its other popular products, including WhatsApp and Instagram, went down for over five hours on Monday. The worldwide outage happened between Sunday’s dramatic unveiling of whistleblower Frances Haugen on “60 Minutes” and Haugen’s scheduled Senate testimony on Tuesday. The hearing is looking at the negative social impacts of Facebook and its other apps. The company attributed Monday’s outage to technical problems. Still, the event functioned as a formidable reminder of how much power Facebook has over the lives of billions of people around the world.
“The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life,” Raymond Zhong of the New York Times writes, adding that Facebook and its many apps “are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns [and] responding to emergencies” around the entire planet.
The social media outage didn’t just make it harder to peruse your high school sweetheart’s Facebook wedding photos or linger overlong on some of the more embarrassing thirst traps you follow on Instagram. As people trying to shop online or use subscription services were reminded, a huge percentage of sites use Facebook as a login program. In some parts of the world, Facebook and WhatsApp stand in for phone service, thereby serving as the main way people communicate with family members, many social services and businesses. Some businesses, such as food vendors, do all of their sales through Facebook-owned platforms.
This illustration of Facebook’s power was likely a coincidence, but it’s still chilling in light of what the Washington Post reports as Facebook’s changed P.R. approach, which comes in the face of Haugen dumping a ton of documents revealing that the company has been aware of how much social damage it causes, but doesn’t care because it’s profitable.
