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If you are a web user and have linked your social media accounts to important online services (from subscribing to a news service to accessing a fitness app and more), there are three key points you should seriously ponder over in the context of the epic outage some services of the American technology giant Facebook experienced last Thursday, creating panic among millions of users across the globe, including in India.
First, no technology, or a tech company for that matter, is omnipotent. They fail. Miserably. Their systems, processes and strategies are quite fallible despite the gargantuan claims they make about them. Second, users now have stronger reasons to demand more transparency in the way technology companies operate. The companies cannot hide behind the fact that they are private enterprises (though some are listed on the bourses) that do not have to be accountable to public demands for scrutiny. But look at the sheer enormity of a service like Facebook. It has more than 2.3 billion users — and technically speaking, that equals a third of the world’s population. Instagram has more than 1 billion profiles. The outage in a way is a hard reminder that we have allowed the tech companies to grow ‘too big to fail’, and now ensuring their upkeep has become a social issue. If you imagine the size of small enterprises or business profiles who were unable to update about their activities online or access services that are linked to their Facebook or Instagram profiles in Thursday’s over 14- hours of blackout, you will be able to gauge the gravity of the situation.
Finally, companies like FB or Google have grown too big so that a hack can cause immeasurable damage. According to the company, the latest outage was not an act of hacking but a server issue. But this offers users an opportunity to think of the impacts of a possible hack and demand that companies to build and deploy suitable remedial measures that can incorporate the requirements of all stakeholders. Creatively fragmentising Big Tech is the need of the hour.
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