Anyone who runs their business on - whose business is totally reliant on - Facebook and WhatsApp simply does not own their business. That is NOT a business plan. If this is how they want to run a business then they should have contingency plans or accept that there is a risk here that may impact them. Bleating about it gets zero sympathy from me. Maybe there is a business interruption insurance opportunity here for insurers to add this coverage. What? Maybe this guy does not have business interruption coverage? Colour me surprised.
As for the people in France, Kenya or South Africa, other voice communication apps are available. I’d say ‘do your own research’ but that has all the wrong connotations at present. Try Viber, Line, or Skype to start with.
The world’s reliance on the Facebook empire is a very bad thing and anything that jolts the world away from it is, in my book, a very good thing.
Any time you let humans communicate with others in mass you will get toxicity. People fucking suck. Blame it on social media all you want, but… in the end, human beings just plain suck.
We interrupt the victim-blaming to bring you a most excellent NYT correction:
Correction: Oct. 4, 2021 An earlier version of this article misstated a Facebook team’s means of getting access to server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif. The team did not have to cut through a cage using an industrial angle grinder.
you get some toxicity in any mass of humans. The Facebook question is whether a monopolistic channel of communication has a perverse incentive and managerial inclination toward enhancing and magnifying the level of toxicity for their own profit. Treating Facebook as an impartial commons misses the mark here.
Every business has points of failure, frequently with communication providers.
You said you ran a business. If you had a website, how many hosting providers did you have redundancy over? How many different email providers did you use, and how did you coordinate which addresses customers were to use? If you placed advertising, and found a means that worked, how much did you invest in ones that didn’t, just in case that newspaper or agency went under? How many phone numbers did you have, and spread across how many providers?
I wonder how many single points of failure there were in your business, how many of them you’d have bleated about having a failure, but think the situation was different purely because those weren’t owned by Facebook.
As to “colouring you surprised” that someone running a food delivery service in Delhi doesn’t have business interruption insurance, I’m glad that you’ve done the research to find out if he’s covered or not, I wasn’t sure. It’s good that you’ve got this knowledge of both British and global business interruption insurance. You’ll be able to help explain it to me. We’re talking about an advertising platform, and a communications and payments platform being down for five hours. Which policy should these companies have had, that would cover this?
Other people seem quite capable to point to this as an issue of dominance by Facebook and the fragmentation of communication, without condescending takes about the people caught up deserving it.
That one won the day yesterday IMO. There was also a variant I saw that said they were all now “trapped in Sword Art Online”.
For those unfamiliar with it, Sword Art Online is an “isekai” anime, where real-world people end up physically stuck inside the world of a fictional MMO of the same name through [technobabble mumbo jumbo].
