“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...