Yesterday, three mega social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for a good six hours.
Facebook blamed the outage on a “faulty configuration change.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Facebook’s “monopolistic behaviour” which caused three huge social media platforms to go out of service at the same time.
During the outage, Caparroso tweeted, “Latin America lives on WhatsApp. I am surprised by so many people underestimating how catastrophic this downfall has been.”
According to Yahoo, Ocasio-Cortez responded to a claim that Latin American communities were disproportionately affected by the Facebook outage due to the high use of Whatsapp in the community.
“It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy,“ the congresswoman said on Twitter in response to Forbes editor Jose Caparroso.
“Remember: WhatsApp wasn’t created by Facebook. It was an independent success. FB got scared & bought it,“ Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now,“ she added. “Break them up.”
A reporter and producer at Reveal, Aura Bogado echoed the sentiments online, “The repercussions of WhatsApp being down in The Rest Of The World are vast and devastating. It's like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. The app essentially functions as an unregulated utility.”
There have been calls to break up big tech monopolies in the past and the outage yesterday which affected everyone worldwide definitely drives the point home.
