The global breakdown of Facebook Inc. highlighted the dangers of depending on its social networking platforms, supporting European regulators' efforts to limit the company's influence just as a whistle-testimony blower's in the United States threatened to draw even more undesirable attention at home.
While Europe awakened to find Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger back online and running, the extent of Monday's shutdown drew immediate and extensive outrage. Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's antitrust director and digital czar, said the Facebook failure will bring attention to the company's dominance.
The networking issue that caused operations to go down for almost 2.75 billion people couldn't have happened at a worse moment. Following a Sunday television interview in the United States, whistle-blower Frances Haugen will testify before a Senate panel on Tuesday, telling legislators the "frightening truth" about Facebook. As Facebook services were offline, Haugen's charges that the business prioritized profit ahead of user safety were still making the headlines.
“It’s always important that people have alternatives and choices. This is why we work on keeping digital markets fair and contestable,” Vestager said. “An outage as we have seen shows that it’s never good to rely only on a few big players, whoever they are.”
The disclosures caused United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call attention to the dangers that nations that depend on these services face. In New York, Facebook rose as high as 1.3 percent to $330.33, reversing a 4.9 percent drop on Monday.
Facebook has increasingly been the subject of multiple antitrust and privacy probes in Europe, as well as intensive scrutiny of even minor transactions, such as its planned acquisition of a customer-service software company. Last month, the firm was fined 225 million euros ($261 million) for data privacy violations, and it is currently under investigation by the European Commission and the German competition agency Bundeskartellamt.
In the next few months, EU lawmakers will decide on new legislation limiting the capacity of strong Internet platforms like Facebook to expand into new services. According to Rasmus Andresen, a German Green member of the European Parliament, the service outage demonstrated the "serious consequences" of relying on one firm for crucial channels of communication, and that Facebook should have never been permitted to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.
Further, facing a political fallout - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has a low tolerance for political criticism on social networking sites, has called for a new digital "order" as a result of the incident. According to Fahrettin Altun, his presidential communications director, the closure demonstrated how "fragile" social networks are, and urged the speedy development of "domestic and national" alternatives.
“The problem we have seen showed us how our data are in danger, how quickly and easily our social liberties can be limited,” Altun said in a series of Twitter posts.
President Muhammadu Buhari's communications staff, government officials, and governors in 36 Nigerian states were all silenced for six hours as a result of the outage. After Twitter's services were banned in Africa's most populous country on June 5th, the administration has become increasingly dependent on Facebook to keep the people informed.
Facebook is “for us opposition politicians one of the last media outlets where we can talk to you and which isn’t dominated by” Fidesz, Orban’s political party, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony said in a video posted on Tuesday.
“This outage does show the over-dependence we have on a single company, and the need for diversity and greater competition,” Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group in London, said in an interview. “Their reliance on data-driven, attention-optimizing products is dangerous and needs to be challenged through interventions enabling greater competition.”
Some telecommunications companies were forced to intervene as a result of the shutdown. In a blog post on its website, the Polish Play unit of Paris-based telecommunications operator Iliad SA reported an eightfold surge in the number of calls as of its customer service. To avoid overloading, it had to modify its network.
