When all Google services went down in December last year, a wave of concern about the fate of the internet world engulfed the planet. Earthlings were mixed with feelings of panic and fear, but the conviction that nothing would ever be the same lasted only until Google resumed functioning, reassuring that nothing could actually be different.

The recent outage of Facebook and its services has opened up space for interpretations of mystery, speculation, publicly expressed desires for the alleged hated network to cease to exist, and secret apprehensions that it might actually happen.

The largest social network, in this expected kind of dependence on the use of its services, builds its influence. Facebook is not a company where an obsession with a positive user experience prevails to the extent that it will cater to users by adapting to their habits in the way that those who directly charge end consumers for what they deliver do.

On the contrary, this giant creates habits to such an extent that the user of its influence is unaware and does not spend resources convincing anyone of the inaccuracy of the assessment that it is the “worst network” as long as you use it. The fact that it has reached a significant place in the lives of most internet users makes even this six-hour downtime for Facebook almost negligible, like the number of those who, disappointed with such a user experience, have decided not to use it anymore.

Facebook is not a local café where no one will stop by anymore because once they received terrible service and experienced an outcome they didn’t expect, so any forecast that this negatively affects its image goes against common sense.

Much more, the image has been tarnished for all those who have built their own business model on the dependence on Facebook – companies for whom it is one of the primary promotion channels because their fate is tied to a service whose disappearance erases them from the customers’ radar.

We know only as much about what happened as the company has stated, and it is quite possible that it will remain so almost forever. It is also very possible that the company has been the most open about its problem precisely because it does not want to leave additional room for doubt. Allegedly, there was a change in the configuration of routers. These are specialized computers that route traffic to websites, and allegedly there was a problem, either a mistake by company engineers or a software glitch.

In a vast system where absolutely everything is automated, an error in action in one place jeopardizes the entire network and could not have been isolated. Why doesn’t Facebook try to explain this to us in more detail? Precisely because it knows that we will not change our relationship with it due to mere dependence on its platform – whether personal or professional, it doesn’t matter.

In the penultimate paragraph of the article that earned today’s number two in the title, Google’s one-hour shutdown was called the largest and longest, but it was mentioned that similar outages can be expected in the future.

Facebook’s image has formally been tarnished by scandals and affairs – unauthorized use of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, numerous legal disputes, both with other tech giants and with national governments, the European Commission, public figures, etc., as well as the freshest example of a former manager, now in the role of a whistleblower. However, fundamentally, nothing has influenced, for example, small companies for whom this social network provides the simplest and cheapest communication channel, to massively leave the platform.

That’s why Facebook, its policies, its own rules, while simultaneously disregarding those rules imposed by other systems, can concern us to the extent that they touch on issues of privacy rights and everything that is the subject of an endless series of disputes constantly brought against it, but what concerns us the most are business models based on this social network being an irreplaceable sales channel.