“This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest.” On October 4, 2021, Facebook, along with its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced a major global outage that lasted for several hours. This unexpected disruption left billions of users disconnected, businesses unable to operate, and content creators struggling to reach their audiences. The cause? A centralized infrastructure failure that highlighted the vulnerability of traditional social media platforms. This incid...

“This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest.” On October 4, 2021, Facebook, along with its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced a major global outage that lasted for several hours. This unexpected disruption left billions of users disconnected, businesses unable to operate, and content creators struggling to reach their audiences. The cause? A centralized infrastructure failure that highlighted the vulnerability of traditional social media platforms. This incid...