I doubt Mark Zuckerberg reads the comments people leave on his Facebook posts.
But if he did, it would take him about 145 days, without sleep, to wade through the flood of comments left for him after he apologized for shutting down all of his services last week.
"Sorry for the inconvenience today," wrote the founder and chief executive of Facebook, after Facebook, Vocap and Instagram were down for six hours.
Facebook blamed the disruption on routine maintenance — its engineers ran a command that inadvertently disconnected Facebook's data centers from the wider Internet.
About 827.000 people responded to Mark Zuckerberg's apology.
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The messages ranged from amused:
"It was terrible, I had to talk to my family," commented one Italian user, to the confused: "I took the phone to the service center thinking it was broken," wrote someone from Namibia.
And, of course, to the very upset and angry: "You can't shut everything down at once." The consequences are of unimaginable proportions," wrote a Nigerian businessman.
Another from India sought compensation for the termination of his employment.
What has become apparent now, if it wasn't already, is the extent to which billions of people have become dependent on these services - not just for entertainment, but also for basic communication and commerce.
What's also clear is that this is far from a one-off situation: experts suggest that widespread internet outages are becoming more frequent and devastating.
"One of the things we've seen over the last few years is an increasing reliance on a small number of networks and companies serving us large chunks of content," says Luke Derricks, chief technical officer at Down Detector.
"When one of them, or more than one, has a problem, it affects not only them, but also hundreds of thousands of other services," he says.
Facebook, for example, is now used to log into a wide range of different services and devices, such as smart TVs.
"And so, you know, we have these 'internet snow days' that happen to us on a regular basis now," Derricks says.
"Something falls and we all just look at each other and just say, 'Huh, so what to do?'"
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Derricks and his team at Down Detector monitor services and websites online for interference.
He says widespread outages affecting major utilities are becoming more frequent and more severe.
"When Facebook has problems, it has great consequences for the entire Internet, but also the economy, and you know... society as a whole.
"Millions, or potentially hundreds of millions of people, are just sitting around waiting for a small team in California to fix something.
"It's an interesting phenomenon that has grown over the last few years."
Larger interruptions u radu
- October 2021: A "configuration error" took down Facebook, Instagram and Vocap for six hours. Other sites such as Twitter also experienced disruptions due to the influx of new visitors to their apps.
- Christmas: More than 48 services including: Erbienbi, Expedia, Home Depot, Salesforce went down for about an hour after a Domain Name System (DNS) error at content delivery company Akamai. It followed a similar decline in the company a month earlier.
- Meitheamh 2021: Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, Github, Shopify, Spotify and several news sites were down for nearly an hour after a previously unknown bug was accidentally triggered by a customer of the Fastli cloud computing service.
- December 2020: Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and other Google services went down simultaneously for about 90 minutes after the company said it encountered an "internal storage quota issue."
- November 2020: A technical problem with one of Amazon's Web Services facilities in Virginia, USA, affected thousands of third-party online services for several hours, mostly in North America.
- March 2019: Facebook, Instagram, and Vocap were down or severely disrupted for about 14 hours after a "server configuration change." Some other sites, like Tinder and Spotify, that use Facebook to log in also felt the effects.
Inevitably, at some point during a major service outage, people start to worry that the outage is the result of some kind of cyber attack.
But experts suggest it's more often an example of a more mundane case of human error, combined, they say, with the way the Internet is kept alive through a complex set of outdated and unstable systems.
During the Facebook crash, experts joked on Twitter that some of the culprits or causes of the system's downfall were "older than the Spice Girls" and were "designed on a napkin."
Spice Girls is a female British female pop group, founded in 1994.
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Internet scientist Professor Bill Buchanan agrees with this characterization.
"The Internet is not the massively distributed network that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the original architects of the Internet, tried to create, which can withstand a nuclear attack on every part of it.
"The protocols it uses are practically the same ones that were devised when we connected to mainframe computers from 'dumb' terminals.
"A single fault in the core of its infrastructure can bring the whole thing to smithereens."
Professor Buchanan says improvements can be made to make the internet more resilient, but many of the fundamentals of the internet will remain the same, for better or for worse.
"In general, systems work, and you can't just 'turn off' certain Internet protocols for a day to try to improve them," he says.
Rather than trying to reconstruct the systems and structure of the internet, Professor Buchanan thinks we need to improve the way we use it to store and share data, or risk more massive outages in the future.
He claims that the boarding school has become too centralized, which means that too much data comes from one source.
That trend should be reversed in systems that have more nodes, he explains, so that one failure cannot stop the entire service.
There is some luck in all the misfortune.
While major Internet outages affect lives and businesses, they can ultimately help strengthen the resilience of the Internet and the Web services attached to it.
For example, Forbes estimates that Facebook lost $66 million during a six-hour downtime, from the inactivity, or exodus, of advertisers on the site.
Such a loss will likely force senior executives to focus a little on making sure it doesn't happen again.
"They lost a huge amount of money that day, not just in the stock price, but in operating income," Derricks says.
"And if you look at the outages caused by content delivery networks like Fastly and Cloudfire, they've also lost a lot of customers to competitors.
"And that's why I think these operators are doing everything they can to keep the Internet stable."
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