Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were shut down on Monday as the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged.
Bitcoin (BTC) crossed $49,000 after dropping to a daily low of $47,166, up about 4.5% in more than two hours, data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows. 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 came with the decline of the large social media platform Facebook, the photo and video sharing app Instagram, and the messaging app WhatsApp – owned by Facebook – at around 3:16 pm UTC on October 4. According to Facebook’s PR team. , who reached out via Twitter, the company has been working to get things back to normal ASAP.
Around the same time on March 13, 2019, the three platforms reported severe blackouts lasting more than 24 hours. At the time, Facebook attributed the problems to “server configuration changes”.
The disruptions could affect community participation in crypto and blockchain projects, but Discord, Twitter, YouTube, and many other platforms are still doing well. Many Crypto Twitter users are already using the event to highlight the need for a decentralized social network built on the blockchain.
“If they had built Facebook on the blockchain, it would never have collapsed,” said Allen Farrington, who regularly writes about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on his Medium blog.
The outbreak also came after a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, passed thousands of other documents to reporters, suggesting the company had not done what it claimed had removed hate speech and messages encouraging violence from the platform, among other things. Facebook shares fell more than 5 percent on Monday to $324.90 at press time.
Related Topics: How the Bitcoin Model Can Solve the Social Media Dilemma
Twitter is already working on a separate decentralization initiative for social media. 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 move from hosting and removing content to recommendation algorithms that direct users’ attention and avoid content that causes controversy and rebellion rather than healthy, informative conversations.
