The day Facebook went dark
Lesson summary
Hi there, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 410. JR is the producer, and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/410.
What did you do on Monday, October 4? I know what you didn’t do, at least for part of the day. You didn’t scroll through Facebook, you didn’t post on Instagram, you didn’t text friends on Whatsapp. And if you work at Facebook, you probably didn’t get much done that day. That’s because the full portfolio of Facebook apps, including many of its internal systems, were down for most of the workday here in the Americas. We have an expression today, “cut off.” And it’s Monday, so we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going.
A day without Facebook
They are some of the most familiar names on the internet: Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. Together, they are the portfolio of apps owned by Facebook, Inc., one of the world’s most valuable companies. And all of them went dark on Monday, October 4, at about 11:30 a.m. New York time. They stayed down for six hours.
For many of the 3.5 billion users worldwide, the outage meant they couldn’t post pictures and videos, give and get likes, text friends, or kill time at work. But for many others, the impact was much more serious. Around the world, people rely on Facebook’s apps for critical parts of their lives.
Businesses promote products and events in their Facebook groups. Schools and neighborhood groups share important information. Politicians use the site to communicate with constituents. Nonprofits use Facebook apps to provide essential services like outreach, counseling, and meal delivery to people in need. Suicide and domestic abuse hotlines often use Whatsapp to provide counseling services.
For many people in rural areas, Whatsapp and Facebook are the Internet. Some cell phone services around the world either don’t offer traditional web browsing or charge extra for it. But Facebook’s apps are often included in the lowest-cost package. For consumers on plans like this, Facebook is the Internet and their connection to the world.
Other people have given up home phone service altogether and rely entirely on Whatsapp to stay connected with the world. Plus, elderly individuals and people not as technically savvy may have been confused and not known about the outage.
Facebook is also how many people log into sites that are not Facebook. That connection wasn’t working during the outage. So, people who regularly signed into news sites, streaming services, shopping sites, or other services, all were cut off from those sites.
The impact was felt especially hard on the smallest businesses, often the one- or two-person micro-businesses that are already stretched thin . Social media and messaging apps have allowed business owners to run their entire operation without a website, traditional phone number, or physical location. The apps have given them the freedom to run their businesses with low overhead. But these business owners discovered how beholden to just one company they really are.
During the outage, delivery drivers couldn’t pick up or deliver orders. Small food service companies like bakeries couldn’t advertise specials or take orders. Online exercise classes were empty, as their customers had no way to launch the virtual class link. Streamers who charge for access to their online content suddenly made no money for an entire day. Hairstylists, online coaches, yoga teachers, jewelry makers, house cleaners, and others all lost access to their customers.
Many people took the occasion to download Telegram and Signal, two rival messaging apps. Telegram, in particular , places a high value on user privacy.
So, what exactly happened to cause the problem? The outage resulted from a cascade of issues. An engineer at a Facebook data center issued a command that was supposed to inquire about capacity in that data center’s servers. But the command had an error in it, and the error accidentally hid all of Facebook’s servers from the rest of the Internet. In simple terms, all Facebook’s servers were working fine, they were just not connected to anything. Facebook has internal tools designed to detect major errors in commands like that, but the tool didn’t work in this case.
The fix was complicated by the fact that all of Facebook’s internal tools for addressing these challenges were also offline. And with three-quarters of the company’s workforce working from home, employees had to scramble to get the centers back online.
Data centers are heavily protected places. There are many layers of security to protect the equipment and the highly sensitive data flowing in and out of the servers. Facebook employees had to drive to the data centers, clear security on site, and then manually fix the issue. Meanwhile, the company somehow had to keep the public up to date with what was occurring. Embarrassingly, they turned to Twitter to give updates and issue apologies.
Facebook’s best news day?
Comedians had their fun with the situation. Jimmy Fallon poked fun at all the other bad news Facebook had already been experiencing that same week. He said that after their entire site crashed, Facebook should celebrate because that was the best press they’d had in months. Stephen Colbert said it meant that the machines have risen up to take over the world…and they know our thoughts, feelings, friends, location, and banking data. Others noted that while Facebook wasn’t working, the rest of the world’s employees were surprisingly productive.
Here in the U.S., people don’t use Whatsapp to communicate as much as they do elsewhere . It’s hard for many people here to fully understand how integral Whatsapp is in daily life in places where phone calls and traditional text messages cost money, web pages don’t load on phones, and Facebook is the entire Internet.
I know from my travels in India and Latin America that for some people, everything is on Whatsapp and Facebook. Their whole business, their whole means of communicating with everyone is Whatsapp, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger. Losing a day of business is bad, especially for individuals who are already stretched thin due to COVID-19. It also makes you wonder about what would happen if this had lasted a week or longer.
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