Bitcoin peaks $49K as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp face global outage
Major social media platforms WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, suffered a six hours long outage on October 4 as Bitcoins and other crypto tokens’ prices surged.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro has shown that Bitcoin (BTC) price rose above $49,000 after suffering a daily low of $47,166. This is an increase of approximately 4.5 per cent in less than two hours. Similarly, the price of Ether (ETH) also rose 3.5 per cent over the same period and reached $3,411 while this news piece was being written.
The sudden price volatility came when social media giants WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram – all owned by Facebook – went down at around 3:16 PM UTC on October 4. In the absence of the social media platforms, the Communications Team at Facebook informed its users over Twitter that the company was working “to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
The outage has occurred exactly after former Facebook employee, and whistleblower Frances Haugen had turned to media with thousands of documents implying that Facebook was not doing what it claimed regarding the removal of hate speech and posts that encourage violence.
Facebook’s stock had fallen by 5 per cent on Monday and reached $324.90 while this piece was being written.
At almost the same time, on March 13, 2019, all three platforms had faced a major outage lasting over 24 hours. Facebook had attributed the issue back then to a “server configuration change.”
Although the interruption might have affected community engagement and blockchain projects around cryptocurrencies, platforms like Telegram, Twigger, YouTube and Discord were functioning normally.
In fact, citing the global social media outage as an example, several crypto Twitter users are already highlighting the need for a decentralized social network built on the blockchain.
Allen Farrington, who writes regularly on Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies on his Medium blog, said that had Facebook been built on a blockchain, “it would never go down.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had announced in December 2019 that the platform is already working on its decentralized social media project. The platform has diverted fundings towards a dedicated team for developing the decentralized standards for social media. The team also has recently;y hired a Crypto Developer for leading the group.
Dorsey had expressed back then that his aim was shifting away from content hosting that sparked controversy and outrage by directing users’ attention to healthy and informative conversations.
