After Facebook and its related services went down for a couple of hours yesterday, crypto enthusiasts used this to showcase that centralized systems aren’t the future.
Other services that went down were Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Facebook cited “networking issues” as being the reason for the outage.
Reports seem to suggest that the problem was tied to DNS issues – for example, Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity reporter, wrote that DNS records were “withdrawn this morning from global routing tables.” Others have also reported that Facebook tried to manually restart servers and even that its employees couldn’t enter buildings as a result of the widespread service disruption.
This was one of the worst outages experienced by Facebook. In 2009, the social media giant experienced an outage of 14 hours, while in 2008, it had one that lasted for almost a day.
Advocates of blockchain and decentralized networks have used this experience to point out that centralized systems can fail on a massive scale.
The founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains, Matthew Gould, declared:
Digital rights advocacy group Access Now said:
People also celebrated the fact that Bitcoin registered a larger market cap than Facebook as the stock price of the social media giant fell. Bitcoin registered a market cap of $925 billion while Facebook stood at below $920.