Major social media and communication platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline Monday as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged.
As data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows, Bitcoin (BTC) price moved above $49,000 after falling to a daily low of $47,166, an increase of roughly 4.5% in less than two hours. Similarly, the price of Ether (ETH) rose 3.5% over the same period to reach $3,411 at the time of publication.
The sudden price volatility comes as major social media platform Facebook, photo and video sharing app Instagram, and messenger app WhatsApp — both owned by Facebook — went down at approximately 3:16 pm UTC on Oct. 4. According to Facebook's communications team, which communicated through Twitter, the company was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
At roughly the same time on March 13, 2019, all three platforms reported a major outage that lasted more than 24 hours. At the time, Facebook attributed the problems to a “server configuration change.”
Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) March 14, 2019
The interruptions may impact community engagement around crypto and blockchain projects, but Discord, Twitter, YouTube and many other platforms are still functioning normally. Many Crypto Twitter users are already using the incident to highlight the need for a decentralized social network built on blockchain.
“If they built Facebook on a blockchain, it would never go down,” said Allen Farrington, who regularly writes about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on his Medium blog.
if they built facebook on a blockchain it would never go down. just an idea, idk.
— allen farrington (@allenf32) October 4, 2021
The outage also follows former Facebook employee Frances Haugen turning over to journalists and others thousands of documents that imply that the company was not doing what it claimed in regard to removing from the platform hate speech and posts encouraging violence, among other things. Facebook’s stock fell by more than 5% on Monday to reach $324.90 at the time of publication.
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 be funding a dedicated team to develop a decentralized standard for social media, and recently hired a crypto developer to lead the group. At the time, Dorsey said the aim was to shift away from content hosting and removal to recommendation algorithms directing users’ attention and to avoid content that sparks controversy and outrage rather than healthy and informative conversations.
This story is developing and may be updated.