Facebook Down. Instagram Down. WhatsApp Down. What does this mean?
What happened with Facebook?
Today, October 4th, Facebook went down without warning. Facebook wasn’t the only service to go offline, however. Instagram was offline as well as WhatsApp went down. What do all of these services have in common? They are all Facebook services and fall under Mark Zuckerberg’s tech umbrella. Perhaps empire is a better word than empire, but nevertheless, Facebook services going down didn’t just hurt Facebook, it also knocked every service that uses Facebook as a key part of functionality offline too. The ripple effect and lost value for not just Facebook, but the countless small businesses that rely on Facebook for promotion, word of mouth, and leads, is incalculable. Most businesses need steady inflows of leads and being completely knocked out from not only leads, but perhaps even basic service functionality is devastating.
What does this mean?
In the short term, most people will register this as a minor inconvenience where they couldn’t post pictures, like, comment, or go on charged rants to family and friends. Others will have a much deeper impact. What this says in a larger context, however, is that the internet is too highly centralized. If one or two key players go down for even part of a day, the ripple effects are tremendous. If Amazon’s AWS, for example, were to go down, over 50% of the internet would stop working. (Verge Article) It wouldn’t just knock out the main sites that people use to consume content, it would take down warehousing, logistics, shipping, messaging, and who knows what else. Google and Microsoft also host huge portions of the internet and represent another potential weakness.
What to do?
There are a few options, and none of them are quick and easy. As a consumer base, we have to migrate away from services that harvest our data and leave us with only vulnerabilities and some minor conveniences. Some great services like DuckDuckGo and Wish are trying to take on search and eCommerce respectively. As a population we can harness our collective awareness around this vulnerability and start offering products and services that make us more decentralized and therefore stronger, and more robust. Concentrations of power, influence, and infrastructure lead to single points of failure where everything can fall apart quick.
This is why Traks exists
I created Traks to be an alternative for businesses that want to provide fantastic customer service without providing support to the leviathan. Traks gives companies the ability to stay on top of their business, connect with customers, and make informed decisions, and it is all automated. We took a novel approach to solving small business problems by developing the product IN a small business and checked to see if it solved their problems. Our mission is best summarized in this post (Our Mission).
Going forward
We should all look to small businesses and burgeoning, unique technology companies to solve the problems we have. It will make us more robust as a nation and as a people. The best way to be strong, is to be decentralized because then, there is no single point of failure. Bitcoin is 100% decentralized and it never goes down. It is always going, even when nations like China decide they’d be better off without it. It can’t be killed because each individual computer is sufficient to run it, but not necessary to the whole. Its strength comes from the distributed nature. Perhaps we call can work to become a bit more decentralized in the products we buy, the services we use, and the stores we visit, just so there’s a backup if it’s needed.