id you try to use Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram yesterday? If you did, chances are you found it was not working. An outage caused all these platforms to stop functioning and showcased our global addiction and dependence on the internet. It also caused Mark Zuckerberg to lose $6 billion in almost 6 hours. The culprit behind the crash was not a nefarious actor. Rather it was because of changes to the internet infrastructure of these platforms that coordinates the traffic between Facebook’s data centers. But in the end, it was a perfect example of how much power Facebook has over the world as the global economy lost over $1 billion. How did the problem get fixed? How exactly did the outage affect the economy? What did people do during the outage? When was the problem finally resolved?
