Major social media communication platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went offline on October 4, 2021, as the Bitcoin price exploded to surpass $49,000. During this outage, most Crypto Twitter users called for the need to develop a decentralized social network powered by blockchain technology.
Market data shows the price of Bitcoin rising to exceed $49,000 after it had plunged to a daily low of $47,166. That is an increase of around 4.5% within two hours. The price of Ether also gained 3.5% within the same period to reach $3,405 at the time of writing.
The sudden market volatility comes as the major social media platforms linked to Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down at approximately 11:16 AM EST on October 4. Based on Facebook’s communications team, who published on Twitter, the firm was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
At almost the same time on March 13, 2019, all these three platforms reported massive outages that lasted over 24 hours. At the time, Facebook attributed the issues to a “server configuration change.”
The interruptions might affect community engagement around cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. However, Twitter, Discord, YouTube, and most of the other social media platforms are still working normally. Most of the Crypto Twitter users are already using the incident to highlight the need for a decentralized social network that is built on blockchain technology.
Allen Farrington, who mostly publishes about Bitcoin and cryptos on his Medium blog, said:
“If they built Facebook on a blockchain, it would never go down.”
This outage also comes after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen turned over to journalists and others thousands of documents that imply that the firm was not doing what it alleged in relation to removing hate speech and posts that encouraged violence from the platform, among many other things.
Facebook’s stock lost over 5% on Monday to trade around $324.89 at the time of writing. Today, Twitter is already working to set up its decentralized social media initiative. CEO Jack Dorsey first confirmed the plans in December 2019 that the platform would be funding a dedicated team that would create a decentralized standard for social media. Twitter recently hired a crypto developer to lead the group.
At that time, Dorsey said that the plan was to move away from content hosting and removal to various recommendation algorithms directing the users’ attention and avoid any content that sparks controversy and outrage instead of informative and healthy conversations.
