Only a few hours were Facebook and its services due to a configuration error. But that was enough to show how great their influence is on communication in Germany as well.
Did the little brother make it home safely after visiting the family? Will the first lesson be canceled for the class tomorrow or not? When was the birthday of your high school friend again?
Information that has a massive impact on our private and everyday lives was not available for six hours on Monday. 3.5 billion users worldwide were affected by the failure of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, in Germany millions looked at their smartphones in disbelief. Much was no longer possible. “We see how dependent we as a society are on a single corporation,” says communication scientist Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw.
How failure limits our lives
“The fact that Whatsapp was affected has a deep impact on the German population,” says the journalism professor at the University of Hamburg. The platform plays an immensely important role in family communication in particular.
Young people let their friends who live further away participate in their own lives via WhatsApp groups – and thus keep in touch. Families plan the upcoming birthday party in the chat. Sports clubs, for example, communicate their upcoming training sessions or the Christmas party via Facebook group. “Most people use social networks for their private life,” said Kleinen-von Königslöw.
According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 71 percent of adult Internet users in Germany are on the market leader WhatsApp, 44 percent are on Facebook and 29 percent on Instagram. Those between the ages of 16 and 64 use social media for almost an hour and a half every day, as surveys by “Datareportal” show.
The economy is also dependent
According to data from “Datareportal”, around 29 million people in Germany can potentially be reached with advertising via Facebook, and 26 million on Instagram. So it’s a big market. The industry association Bitkom announced that 30 percent of companies in Germany used social media for internal and external communication. Two thirds of them rely on messenger services, according to Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder.
Above all, the influencer business in Germany runs on social media such as Instagram. There may have been a few minutes of advertising or live switching on Monday. “But these are niches and not existential goods,” says Kleinen-von Königslöw.
According to their knowledge, it looks different outside of Germany. “In developing countries such as Ghana, Facebook and Co. are virtually the Internet and the only way to communicate,” notes the communication scientist. “If the infrastructure fails there, entire branches of the economy collapse.”
Looking for alternatives
If the WhatsApp message does not go through, then in this country the old paths have to be used again. Telefónica (O2) registered an increase of 36 percent in the total duration of calls and even a threefold increase in old-school text messages via SMS during the time of the failure on Monday. “The search for alternatives is annoying, but possible,” says Kleinen-von Königslöw.
Competing providers to WhatsApp have been advertising their security standards and how they handle user data for years – such as Signal, Threema or Wire. US whistleblower Edward Snowden is also currently to consider: The WhatsApp failure must remind you “that you and your friends should probably use a more private, non-profit-oriented alternative,” he writes on Twitter.
But Facebook has created a real network of services: The US group cleverly links its offer with the messenger service WhatsApp, which was purchased in 2014 for 19 billion US dollars (then 14 billion euros) and the photo platform Instagram, which it took over in 2012.
“I’m afraid that for most people, convenience is a reason not to be dissuaded by Facebook and WhatsApp,” expects Kleinen-von Königslöw. It therefore demands that politics take action above all. “My hope is that the failure will make it clear to the authorities how great the need for regulation is.”
Schadenfreude on the net
In this country, for example, the Facebook failure is trending massively on Twitter. Hashtags like #facebookdown or #whatsappdown were still the most widespread in Germany on Tuesday. Above all, the long-standing accusation against Facebook of providing a platform for disinformation in the corona pandemic with insufficient moderation is being targeted. “After Facebook and WhatsApp failure: Vaccination practices report a sudden onslaught,” says the satirical magazine “Der Postillon”.
However, Twitter can only dream of user numbers that run into the billions around the world, as is the case with Facebook. Most recently it was around 206 million in the second quarter of 2021. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, around 12 percent of adult Internet users in Germany are on Twitter.
But when Facebook and Co. went to their knees, it seemed as if quite a few migrated to the steadfast competitor. “Hello literally everyone”, Twitter greeted “literally everyone” who had now got lost on the platform with the birdie. The news received more than three million likes by Tuesday noon. And the British singer Adele, for example, who has long been neglecting to update her Twitter account about once a year, tweeted after months: “Hiya babes” (“Hello, you love”).
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