Facebook has more than 1 billion monthly active users and a majority of them are online at any given point in time. When the network crashed for the third time in a month, users took to Twitter to express their anguish at the outage. FB user Teri Gidwitz wrote, “Uh oh. Looks like a @facebook outage”. Another user Mark Barret wrote, “I join a social media company and Facebook has an outage. Coincidence?.” There were some people who jibed at the situation. “So excited to be a part of the Facebook outage of 2015,” tweeted Tim Joseph. The outage happened because of a Graph API failure, a system that connects the basic Facebook infrastructure. Such regular crashes affected Facebook shares and they plunged by 4% on Monday. Apart from the effect it had on the business of the social media network, it also affected life for many users. “I was in the middle of a business chat when it suddenly it went down. I got frantic thinking someone has hacked into my account,” says a local businessman. “There is already a network issue in my area. Luckily yesterday I got access to the internet. I was chatting up with an old school friend after years and the site went down. I refreshed the page for several minutes but nothing happened.” How social media outages affect our lives is a direct reflection of how dependent we are on the virtual world. For some of us services like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are an integral part of life. One routinely sees people spending more time social networking than talking to their family members. Is this the kind of addiction we should be looking at?
