Facebook and its other social media platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, temporarily went down late on Monday in the US, Canada and various other parts of the world.
During the service outage, some users were unable to log in while others only failed to post anything or communicate with friends. Although the issue has since been fixed, Facebook has not revealed any specific details about the bug which caused the outage or whether it posed any security risks or not.
The service outage reportedly started at around 21:00 GMT as per the downdetector.com website, and it mostly affected users based in North America and European nations. A majority of the affected users experienced a downtime of around 90 minutes, however, it was not limited to a particular region and was recorded to a different extent across the globe.
The moral of the story
The moral of the story, so to speak, is that the hegemony of Facebook (it owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger) in the social media sphere is one that has to be looked with a worrying eye because if Facebook is hit with a cyber attack it virtually puts the social media world to a halt.
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