Professor Discusses Social Media Platform Outages
McKnight writes: “Meta suffered an outage disrupting Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger access use Tuesday morning for a few hours, reminding many of AT&T’s more epic outage a week earlier. How soon we forget the Red Sea Internet cable cut, also Tuesday, disrupting about 25% of Internet traffic between the Middle East and Europe.
Conspiracists and cybersecurity sales managers will both be disappointed by the truth: Tuesday was just another day of human errors and random accidents keeping our cloud to edge interconnected lives…interesting. Perhaps a bit edgier than most days since we could not retreat to our virtual reality for a few hours, but not by a lot.
Since we all completely forgot Instagram’s outage of May 2023. (And oh yeah Instagram’s 2021 outage because of a router configuration mistake…what month was that again?)
All this does is highlight the importance of cloud management, as we teach at the iSchool, and cloud architecture, as we also teach, since badly designed services are more vulnerable to disruption as technical issues such as a random accidental or Houthi-enabled cable cuts -perhaps- disrupt load balancers and -perhaps- coincidentally, cloud services worldwide. Or perhaps, it was just another cloud misconfiguration as AT&T customers suffered from a week earlier; from the outside it is hard to say precisely.
What we all should be aware of is our own need to be adaptive and resilient, and search for other networks when our primary ones are out.”
