In my opinion, the global crash that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger suffered is definitely something that will be remembered by the users of this app for a long time. Mainly because of two reasons: first, because these are some of the most used apps all around the world, so lots of people and businesses were affected by this crash, incapable of connecting with people and entertaining themselves and for businesses, connecting with their customers. And second, because Facebook INC. is such a big company and has a brand known worldwide such a problem such as this could potentially be catastrophic for this company and negatively affect its reputation.
In fact, this global crash has already hurt the image and the reputation of the company. An example of this are all the comments and messages that users posted on Twitter roasting Facebook for this crush, complaining about how such a big and important company could be down for 6 hours.
But this global crash is not the only time that Facebook has faced big problems. Facebook has been implicated in other more serious legal problems; a very famous example is the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. What happened was that the data of millions of users was collected without their consent by Cambridge Analytica, mainly for political purposes and targeted advertising. When this was discovered, Facebook was fined 5 billion dollars because of privacy violations, and also users were really upset about how Facebook sold their personal information without their consent.
Interestingly, I didn’t realise how hooked I am to WhatsApp or Instagram until this global crash took place. I felt like I was somehow lost , without being able to talk to people or entertain myself using Instagram. I was just hoping that these apps worked again. But I think that more than an addiction, it’s a basic need and the world has had evolved so that these apps are a basic need for nearly half of the population. And even if we don’t want to, we will somehow rely on social media to connect with other people, or even other companies for their business. That’s why, in my opinion, a global crash of this size really affects users in a negative way, since social media are necessary nowadays in order to keep in touch with people, and we have all grown so used to it that we wouldn’t be able to survive without it.
