Social media is used not only as a communication medium, but also a business platform. When social network services are down, both Facebook and their users suffer losses.
By
Benediktus Krisna Yogatama
·4 minutes read
JAKARTA, KOMPAS — Facebook, Inc. has identified the cause of the disruption that hit the social networking platform for several hours on Monday. The disruptions to Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram had a broad impact because many people use the social networking platforms, not only for communication but also business.
In Indonesia, users could not access Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram for several hours from about 10:30 p.m. Western Indonesia Time (WIT) on Monday until around 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday. The disruption of the social networking services provided by the American company affected millions of users around the world.
The three social media platforms owned by the Facebook, Inc. reported that the outage occurred at 11:30 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), or Eastern Time. Services were back online at about 6 p.m. EDT, after about seven hours of disruption.
In an official statement uploaded to the Facebook site on Tuesday (5/10, WIT), Facebook vice president Santosh Janardhan said that engineers and technicians found that the disruption to its social networking services was caused by changes in the configuration of backbone routers that coordinates network traffic between its data centers.
“The disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said.
He denied allegations that the social media network was hijacked by external parties. "We also have no evidence that user data was used when the system was down," he said.
He apologized to all users that were affected by the service disruption, including businesses around the world. According to business and economics media Fortune, Facebook could see estimated losses of up to US$99.75 million (Rp 1.4 trillion) due to the service outage.
Kompas
(FILES) This file photo taken on October 1, 2019, shows the logos of mobile apps Facebook and Google displayed on a tablet in Lille, France.
The estimate was based on Facebook\'s second-quarter revenue, which reached $29.08 billion over a 91-day period. This meant that the Facebook’s daily average income totaled $319.6 million, or the equivalent of $13.3 million per hour.
The figure did not take into account peak traffic hours or days. These factors were used to calculate the potential daily losses that Facebook could suffer from a service outage.
Facebook\'s share price on Nasdaq fell 4.89 percent to $326.23 at the close of trading.
Based on data from We Are Social released in early 2021, Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users to make it the most widely used social media platform in the world.
WhatsApp ranks third with 2 billion users and Instagram fifth with 1.2 billion users. The combined users of these three social networking services totaled 5.9 billion people, or around 75 percent of the global population of 7.85 billion.
According to Internet World Stats, the number of Facebook users in Indonesia reached 175.3 million at the end of March 2021. This figure ranks Indonesia as the second largest Facebook user country in Asia, with India taking the top slot. Meanwhile, Indonesia has 68.8 million WhatsApp users, the fourth largest in the world after India, Brazil and the United States.
According to Statista data, the number of Instagram users in Indonesia totaled 93 million as of July 2021, the fourth largest in the world after India, the United States and Brazil.
When the services are down, they lose advertising revenue.
Ismail Fahmi, the founder of Drone Emprit and Media Kernels Indonesia, said Indonesia was lucky because the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram network outages occurred during the night until the early morning, so the impact was minimal. "Imagine if it happened during the day. Considering the large number of Indonesian users on the three social media services, the losses would have been far greater," he said.
Social media is used not only as a communication medium, but also a business platform. When social network services are down, both Facebook and their users suffer losses.
“When the services are down, they lose advertising revenue. On the other hand, for users, the scheduled ads are not seen by their target consumers," said Ismail.
This article was translated by Hendarsyah Tarmizi.
