On 3rd July 2019, the 3 top online platforms were plagued with server issues. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all had major issues. Photos could not be shared or seen and more.

So what happened, everyone flocked to twitter. There was a sigh of relief around the world that cups of coffee and cake, plates of food and a million more selfies never got shown. Perhaps, people actually decided to speak to each other, instead of communicate online only. Forget that last point, nobody knows how to do this anymore.

Joking aside, the major incident shows just how vulnerable the internet can be when one company Facebook which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, suffers major server issues which in turn impact all its other services and companies.

You might be thinking, so what. However, there are major side effects and consequences of this scenario. All three services are used across the globe to communicate from personally and for businesses. So when Facebook goes down, companies lose money. Small and large businesses use Facebook and Instagram to sell their products and services and whilst the advertising fees won’t get charged, the lost revenue is still lost revenue. This could be £10,000 a day for some companies. Maybe considerably more. Maybe a bit less. But multiply that by several million and the lost revenue is huge.

What if Facebook got hacked. Which imploded onto WhatsApp and Instagram and all the data got deleted and couldn’t be restored. Then what ?

Which begs the question, should one company like Facebook be allowed to be this powerful and on such a global scale?