Serious question: Was any value lost? (this may appear sarcastic)
Facebook obviously loses some ad revenue and Facebook customers may lose sales. But do Facebook/Instagram users suffer? But how does losing social media for several hours affect the quality of life of users?
I am not a big fan of social media too but you will be suprised ... For example here in Sudan (East Africa) the country has been under continuous protests for over 2 months now (53 dead, 4k+ detained, 500+ injured) with strong censorship from the regime & silents from the internatinal community. So facebook, whatsapp & twitter are the only media left for the people to fight for freedom —> every Thursday is the main protests in the week and this Wedensday night the outage might affect this as thousands around Sudan won't know about the meeting points of tomorrow!!!
Actually the government did block all social media for over a month but that was fixable with vpn. (Follow hashtag #SudanUprising on twitter to learn more)
I doubt Sudanese protestors are watching football and eating big macs on their off-time. Most likely limiting their protests to once a week 1. makes for a single, effective push, 2. keeps the protestors and their families from starving.
Lmao "no disrespect intended" "scheduling it between watching the football and eating big macs." pick one and keep in mind you're talking about Sudan and not the US...
As I said: "Main protests on Thursday" so no, Sudanese ppl don't protest once a week & btw People get shot here just for standing out and peacfully protesting so its far a way from the picture you have in mind. I've put a hashtag where you can see photos/videos & learn more and ofcourse share productivity tips
What I asked was what is the effect of sporadic interruptions of few hours. I mean, if Facebook had 30% availability, would I lose anything valuable from the experience? Is it that we are just used to it and and want it to be there always?
The value of 99.5 availability fore __users__ is not clear to me. Instant messaging is exception for this.
I know parents who keep in touch with their children via Messenger. In part because it works in more places: Messenger works wherever there's internet over wifi not just cell service. People rely on Facebook for non-trivial reasons whether or not I (or someone else) think it's a good idea or not.
It might seem pithy, but my wife has a small internet based business and uses facebook as a login for one of the sites she sells on. So, today instead of being able to autofill labels directly for shipping, she had to hand type addresses in for all shipping labels for products sold on that site.
I reached out to an old acquaintance that could be a great help to my company. I reached out over Facebook. Now that contact can not respond and may have not even seen my message. I have no other way of contacting this person. This affects my business.
I hate Facebook, but to deny its value is pretty naive.
FB has effectively replaced all other text messaging for several of my social circles. It's nice when you have groups that kinda change over time, otherwise group-texts always end up with numbers you don't necessarily have in your phone, etc.
I consider my relationship with Messenger separate from FB. Most of my conversations happen there. I've deleted FB from my phone, but I don't think I could ever go without Messenger.
I used to be like that. One day I just sent the same message to all people I still contacted on messenger saying that I was getting rid of it in one week and listing 3 alternate services people could use to contact me. Didn't lose a single contact and never looked back.
For hours, not especially - it's annoying but no worse than a power cut. There could even be benefits.
On the other hand, if someone were to sabotage the platform and prove/convincingly argue that they induced the failure, at minimum it would do significant damage to the tech sector and at maximum cause public panic.
This is a hypothetical, not speculation on the cause of this outage.
Obviously this could be argued differently from a shareholder perspective, but I would say otherwise no. Interestingly, this might be one of the only times where a large outage could be claimed to be adding value. Again, not for FB, but for users, sure.
After a few hours of not being able to use an app people might start realizing how addicted they are to it. "I was bored initially but then realized talking to people in real life still works."
Facebook obviously loses some ad revenue and Facebook customers may lose sales. But do Facebook/Instagram users suffer? But how does losing social media for several hours affect the quality of life of users?