Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working this morning as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies soared.
As data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows, Bitcoin (BTC) price moved above $49,000 after dropping to a daily low of $47,166, up nearly 4.5% in less than two hours. Similarly, the price of Ether (ETH) increased 3.5% over the same period to reach $3,411 at press time.
The sudden fluctuation in prices comes with major social media platform Facebook, photo and video sharing app Instagram, and messaging app WhatsApp – both owned by Facebook – dropping at around 11:16 a.m. EDT on Oct. 4. According to Facebook’s communications team, via Twitter, the company I was “Working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Around the same time on March 13, 2019, all three platforms reported a major outage that lasted more than 24 hours. At that time, Facebook attributed Problems with “change server configuration”.
The outages may affect community engagement around crypto and blockchain projects, but Discord, Twitter, YouTube, and many other platforms are still operating normally. Many Crypto Twitter users are already using this incident to highlight the need for a decentralized social network built on the blockchain.
“If they build Facebook on the blockchain, it will never collapse.” She said Allen Farrington, who writes regularly about bitcoin and cryptocurrency on his medium blog.
The outage also follows a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, who handed over to journalists and others thousands of documents indicating that the company did not do what it claims in terms of removing hate speech and posts encouraging violence from the platform, among other things. Facebook stock is down more than 5% Monday to $324.90 at press time.
Related: How the Bitcoin Model Can Solve the Social Media Dilemma
Twitter is already working on its own decentralized social media initiative. CEO Jack Dorsey first announced in December 2019 that the platform would fund a team dedicated to developing a decentralized social media standard, and it recently hired a crypto developer to lead the group. At the time, Dorsey said the goal was to shift from hosting and removing content to recommendation algorithms that direct users’ attention and avoid contentious and infuriating content rather than healthy, informative conversations.
This story is evolving and may be updated.
