Social media usage across the Facebook triad that includes Instagram and WhatsApp as well was on Wednesday, 3 July 2019, affected by significant outages. Twitter was awash with#Facebookdown and #instagramdown as users were unable to upload or send images, videos and other files on the apps. The same was with WhatsApp, where users reported that they were unable to download or view images that had been sent to them.
Facebook later posted a message to its official Twitter account apologizing for the global outage while noting that the “issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100 percent for everyone.” However, thanks to the outage, we took a few notes that we can learn from.
Fake news is a bigger bug
In the midst of the outage, many WhatsApp users started receiving fake messages saying that the app had been banned, with others adding that that they will be charged for using it in future if they did not spread the word. One thing that was evident about the messages spreading was that they were created by persons that have no idea of the app’s operations and ownership.
For instance one message that pointed at “inconvenience in satellite connection” came with a ‘Thank you — Google’ sign-off, which would call for inquiry on why Google would be sending messages about WhatsApp’s ban yet it is owned by Facebook.
The other fake message was “to inform all of our users that we have sold whatsapp to Mark Zuckerberg for 19 billion $. WhatsApp is now controlled by mark zuckerberg” with a warning that the app was cutting out all inactive users and one had to spread the word to be counted in. But the reality is that Zuckerberg is the Facebook CEO, with full ownership of WhatsApp.
The peaks and valleys of Facebook AI
As Facebook users failed to see images in their feed during the outage, the images on the site were replaced with the tags that they were assigned by the company’s machine vision systems. The platform has been using machine learning to visualize images this way since 2016, and such tags are used to describe photos and videos to users with sight impairments.
While the scene is a familiar one to users in emerging markets, the reactions to the outage on Twitter proved that this iwas new information to a lot of people.
