Apps owned by Facebook, stopped working on Monday 4th October,2021 for more than 6 hours. The 3 social Apps; Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook. Many users across the world were inconvenienced as they could not access services offered by the apps. The Facebook teams communicated that the outage was due to configuration changes on the backbone routers which coordinate the network traffic. Services brought to a halt due to the disruption to network traffic, had cascading effect on the way data centers communicate.
There were many theories circulating on the internet since the outage occurred about the cause of the outage. In a statement issued later, Facebook said it had no evidence that any user data was compromised during the disruption of its services. Facebook gave apologies to everyone impacted by outages of the Facebook-powered services. The Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook outages came shortly after a whistleblower claimed that the company could do more to protect against hate speech and misinformation but the company prioritizes profits over its users.
The inconveniences experienced by the users of the 3 common Apps have left many Netizens looking for alternative social media networks and sites.
Here is a list of top 15 social media networks and sites among the many others as per the users’ reviews.
| Social media platform | Users worldwide | Areas of application | |
| 1. | 1.7 billion | Post status updates, upload images and videos, marketing among others | |
| 2. | 964 million | Sharing images and videos, one-to-one and group messaging between users | |
| 3. | 186 million | Similar to Tumblr and Instagram; posts by user appears in their followers’ feeds, and vice versa. Users also accompany their tweets with images, videos, gifs, and hyperlinks | |
| 4. | 740 million | Similar to Facebook, users post status updates, images, or videos. Making professional connections referred to as a user’s network. Users profile is the modern resume as it features a professional’s work history, education, skills e.t.c. Users search for employment on LinkedIn. Mostly used by employers to recruit staff from qualified candidates. | |
| 5. | Snapchat | 293 million | Sending images and videos. Snapchat mimics an in-person conversation. Users are also able to add virtual stickers, text, and 6.doodles on their pictures or videos to customize them |
| 6. | Tumblr | 319 million | Posts consist of only text, only images or videos, or a combination. Otherwise it is similar to Instagram |
| 7. | 459 million | Sharing and collecting pieces of multimedia and saving them to a virtual bulletin board (devoted to a specific topic; such as cooking, crafting or music) | |
| 8. | YouTube | 2.1 billion | Video-sharing social network |
| 9. | WhatsApp Messenger | 2.0 billion | Communication through text messages, images, voice calls and video calls |
| 10. | Facebook Messenger | 1.3 billion | Send messages, exchange photos, videos, and other files, group chats or one-to-one communication, calling, play games, send money between users. Businesses Facebook chatbot platform |
| 11. | TikTok | 1.0 billion | Posting short-form videos |
| 12. | Google+ | 395 million | Similar to Facebook; users post photos and status updates, chats, video call privately or in groups with other users in Google Hangouts |
| 13. | 330 million | Users submit links, create content and discuss topics of interest with other like-minded individuals. Posts are arranged subject-wise and a subreddits is created e.g. news, TV shows, music, fitness, and many more. Posts are rated boosting or lowering the posts position on the site | |
| 14. | Skype | 100 million | Video chat or make voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, and among others. Moreover, Skype offers ability to message back and forth and send text, images, videos or any other digital document. |
| 15. | Flickr | 112 million | Upload photos and videos and explore content uploaded by other users who have their own Photo stream, which is the collection of all of the photos they have ever shared. Similar to Pinterest |
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