On October 4, there was a massive outage of services of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Around that time, there were news reports that discussed a Facebook whistle-blower who stated in no uncertain terms that the social media firm chooses profit over safety of its users. They are unrelated in the truest sense, but at least a few former employees would have been happy with both. Around 9.30 p.m., I realised that my WhatsApp messages froze. I restarted my phone to change my fortune, but to no avail. Facebook too was in slow motion when it rendered the home page.
The Messenger service was hanging. This predicament made me invoke the philosophical concept of Hanlon’s razor — never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I had no intention to unearth any cybersecurity breach as a potential reason that caused this debacle, and settled down to watch the final moments of an IPL game.
Brain freeze
The next morning, my brain cells froze from a deluge of messages in the chat group. The classic undertone of many a message in different groups had the Hanlon’s concept replayed.
A few friends had restarted their phones and the Wi-Fi modem, changed connectivity between two different providers, changed location of the router, turned off and on data on their phone, had asked family members to provide a Wi-Fi hotspot, uninstalled and reinstalled the apps, made international calls to check status abroad — and last but not the least, one woke up a neighbour to request the password to access his Wi-Fi connection. The possibility of a Chinese attack was a matter of conjecture.
Profit is supreme
The whistle-blower revealed the mindset of corporates where business means profits. Not the well-being of their users, not the mental health of victims of social media who get aggressively trolled, not even the true intent of the internal research team that revealed to them in a plethora of reports about the ill-effects of Facebook especially on teenage girls.
If people left companies for greener pastures, former Facebook employees struck a different tone.
The typical Indian approach from the days of yore has taught us invaluable lessons. During our growing-up years, when we had those power outages, we shut the books and rejoiced and retired early under the mosquito net.
I shut the light next to my bed and fell asleep, and realised a full eight hours of slumber revitalised my body and helped thaw my brain cells.
Metaverse in play
Lo and behold, towards the end of October, the Facebook Board had chosen a new name “Meta”. With a focus to bring metaverse to life and the acquired apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp under one new company brand, it once again made news.
Whether it is a marvellous field goal or an ignominious self-goal will soon be evident. The comments mocked Facebook for the ill-repute it had gained in recent years from the whistle-blower as well as the Cambridge Analytica data scandal as the primary reason to morph into a new avatar.
With the new name, the brand ambassador stands at a precipice since in the Hebrew language, meta means “dead”.
Facebook, October truly belonged to you since you have hogged the limelight to the hilt!
p_harihar@hotmail.com