The Take

When Facebook went dark

An hours-long outage has exposed the extent of Facebook’s reach – raising questions over whether it should be broken up.

Facebook blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the global outage that lasted several hours in early October [File: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters]

For six hours on October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all owned by the same parent company, were inaccessible to the 3.5 billion people who use them.

The outage exposed just how extensive Facebook’s communications empire is, and left people wondering if it is a monopoly that needs to be broken up.

In this episode:

Ruchi Kumar (@RuchiKumar), freelance journalist
Sanjay Nagral (@SanjayNagral), surgeon in Mumbai
Edyta Norejko, co-founder of ForHouse; Lail Hossain, founder of With a Spin
Maritza Felix, founder of Conecta Arizona
Alex Harman (@CitizenAlex3), competition policy advocate at Public Citizen

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Source: Al Jazeera