Fury over Facebook crash ‘shows it’s as vital as gas and electricity’

ANGER over Facebook going down after an IT glitch proves that social media has become as essential as gas and electricity for many of its users, a study has claimed.

Researchers said the furious reaction to the platform’s six-hour outage last year showed how dependent both individuals and businesses had become on it.

The study, by US Penn State University, analysed 223,815 tweets that used the hashtag #facebookdown during the disruption on October 4 last year.

Lead author Professor Shyam Sundar said: ‘It is not simply that people are dependent on it at a social level. When these social media sites go down, businesses also go down. A lot of people engage in business transactions on Facebook apps, such as WhatsApp and Instagram.’

He added that online platforms need to look at the blackouts as seriously as utility companies, adding: ‘This study throws light on the fact that social media leaders need to better prepare their companies to face outages.’