Global Facebook outage shows over-reliance on the social network, analysts suggest

The recent global Facebook outage has demonstrated that organisations are over-reliant on the social media giant to maintain their business operations, analysts have argued.

Some 3.5 billion people saw access to their social media networks interrupted earlier this week, with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram’s operations disrupted for up to six hours across the globe.

According to a release from Facebook, the service was down because of a “faulty configuration change”.

Despite coming back online after six hours, the outage caused Facebook’s stocks to drop by some 5 per cent wiping almost $7 billion from Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth.

Analysts have however suggested that the recent outage proves that businesses are over reliant on the social media giant to sustain their business operations.

Major General (Ret’d) Marcus Thompson, senior advisor at the Macquarie Telecom Group and co-host of the Cyber Security Uncut podcast explained that many businesses were left without other means of reaching clientele during the outage.