Facebook’s consortium of social apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and its Oculus virtual reality headset, lost all of its power on Monday, taking the platform offline for a total of six hours before impacting billions of users and businesses around the world achieved.
The issue was first reported on October 4th at around 3:16 p.m. UTC when a flurry of complaints surfaced from users worldwide claiming they could not access their favorite social media platforms.
A post-Cloudflare analysis of the crisis concluded that Facebook “has stopped advertising routes to its DNS prefix,” meaning the platforms “DNS servers are not available”.
Although a small number of personal statements suspected of hacking or tampering were circulated following the recent whistleblower’s story, no official evidence in support of these theories has been reported.
In an official blog post published on Tuesday, Facebook detailed its suspicions regarding the cause of the failure:
“Our engineering teams were aware that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers were causing these communications disruptions.”
After March 2019 switch off, which lasted 24 hours, Facebook also cited a problem with “changing server configuration”.
In yesterday’s statement, the social media giant continued:
“We would like to make it clear at this point that the main cause of this failure is an incorrect configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised by this downtime. “
Dorsey’s dream of decentralization
When the Facebook giant crashed in a public square, the crypto community’s call for open, decentralized social networks echoed in the neighboring city of Twitter.
A decentralized social media standard is an initiative Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is passionate about, as detailed in a tweet in 2019 and earlier this year.
We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open, decentralized standard for social networks. Our goal is to be the client of this standard for the public chat layer of the Internet. We call it @blue sky: https://t.co/51or6OuNNv
– jack⚡️ (@jack) January 14, 2021
It appears that in response to Dorsey’s efforts, Aave DeFi Credit Protocol CEO Stani Kulechov has announced ambitious plans to launch an Ethereum-based Twitter rival later this year, stating, “Because Jack Aave will be built on Bitcoin , Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum. “
Ironically, by a tweet!
The Achilles heel of the social giants
In recent years, waves of ethical concerns about data breaches, data collection, censorship, and fake news have made the already prevalent social media platforms innovative.
The prevalence and severity of such problems have even begun to discourage conscious users from breaking away from the centralized giants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in favor of natural alternatives.
The rapid emergence of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, especially its fundamental characteristics of decentralization, transparency, and community rewards, has spurred the growth of generational initiatives.
As representatives of Web 3.0, the platforms of tomorrow promise to build a fairer, more integrative model of digital interaction and to redesign the values of social space in order to promote freedom of expression, performance, user welfare and self-administration.
Subsocial is an open platform for social networks and decentralized marketplaces based on Polkadot and IPFS. It aims to give users full data rights, which means that their sensitive data, content and sources of income are released to facilitate the development of fair, open and independent communities.
With core features like Spaces and Posts, users can take a DIY approach to create their own decentralized versions of the most popular social apps we use today like Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Patreon, and more.
Aware of the well-documented shortcomings of their predecessors, Subsocial users have a full license to be creative throughout their experience and benefit from personalization with “personalized newsfeed and notifications”, transparent reputation, full-text search and extensive content formats without sacrificing SEO . “
As stated in the project report, the network is more than just a “blogging platform with crypto payments”. It is “Social Finance, where Social Media meets DeFi”.
Related: Bitcoin tops $ 49,000 as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp go down
Cointelegraph spoke to two active participants in the decentralized ecosystem who were trying to develop alternative, Web 3.0-enabled models for the current technology experience.
The founder of the decentralized search engine Presearch, Colin Pape, spoke about the importance of ownership in the social field:
“Web 3.0 needs to go beyond the problem that is causing this problem: centralization. Instead, take a decentralized approach that puts power back in the hands of users and stimulates them to maintain a safer digital world, and especially online when you need it.
Anatha Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) CEO Ed DeLeon spoke about the potential impact a DAO could have in this area:
“Socially owned social networks seems to be one of the most obvious steps we can take to prevent this from happening. The technological tools required to build socially useful, socially responsible and socially responsible communication platforms are already in place, especially the medium of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO).
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“Socially owned social networks seems to be one of the most obvious steps we can take to prevent this from happening. The technological tools required to build socially useful, socially responsible and socially responsible communication platforms are already in place, especially the medium of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO).
