The Facebook outage highlights the fragility of our online lives

No one could be in any doubt of the immense power of Facebook, but this week that truth was made clearer than ever. When the site suffered a major outage on Monday – taking down Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram with it – the impact was instant. Users seeking answers flocked to Twitter, Google, Reddit and news sites in extraordinary numbers.

By looking at Google Trends – a way of tracking what other people are searching for on Google – you can see just how large the spike in the US was for searches such as “Facebook”, “WhatsApp” and “Instagram”.

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If we change this data to look worldwide, the dependence on WhatsApp clearly emerges.

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The Facebook blackout was a welcome break for many users, a chance for a brief social detox and an excuse not to reply to that unread message. However, although only five hours long, and not its most severe outage, it is interesting to note what people were searching as servers returned to normal. As well as the inevitable “is Facebook back?” and “why did Facebook go down?”, there was a surge in questions about backing up data.

As soon as people’s timelines reappeared and phones once again began to ding, Google Trends showed people searching how to back up their Facebook photos and how to save old WhatsApp messages. Users seemed keen to ensure that their content had been unharmed, and were potentially preparing for the possibility of a disruption such as this happening again.

Facebook has since shared a predictably vague message about the cause of the outage, stating that “we believe the root cause was a faulty configuration change” and assuring users that they “have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime”.

Our interlude from Facebook this week may have been brief but it begs the question: should we be so reliant on one company? And just how fragile are our online lives?

Yours,

Lucy Anna Gray

US audience editor