Facebook’s Downtime Reveals More Than We Think

There is no outside to Facebook as there is no outside to capitalism and downtime is not an equally distributed problem

“Melted” by craig1black is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The last 48 hours have not been great for Facebook. In fact, it really hasn’t been all that great for the last month. Over the last several weeks, Facebook has suffered a variety of public relations issues from leaks, to user pushback, to congressional hearings to an untimely massive blackout.

More than the PR issues that now haunt the social media behemoth, we were exposed to the limits of our web literacies and a vast misunderstanding of how Facebook is weaved into our lives. Users on Twitter and Tumblr poked endless fun at Facebook users throughout the day, but saw the issue from a fairly content based point of view — and a US-centric one at that.

But two things became glaringly clear: we have no idea how important Facebook and its products are globally and we have little concept of internet technical infrastructure. (The literacy of its products are…