The Social Media Outage - Was it really all THAT bad?

by Sophie Andrews

On the 4th of October, 2021, at around 15:00, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and most apps owned by Facebook all became completely unavailable for around 7 hours or more, with over 10 million users globally having reported their problems.

Personally, this outage almost acted as a period of self-reflection for me, I found myself subconsciously going to open Instagram time and time again, even though, of course, I knew it had crashed, but this didn’t stop me from opening it. I think our generation (Generation Z) are all fully aware we are addicted to social media, the only difference is, most of us don’t see the harm, or, we do see the harm, and do nothing about it.

Typically, in this day and age, if you were to ask a teenager if they had any form of social media, and they replied ‘no’, that would be considered highly unusual and you’d be quick to ask ‘WHY?’ as if they are receiving some sort of punishment; but why do we consider social media such a treat?

Our reliance on social media is shocking, but what do we rely on it for? For small businesses and art creators, social media is an amazing place for marketing their products and receiving helpful feedback, but what if you don’t do any of those things? “I can message my friends on there” is something I usually excuse my addiction for, however, I’m aware I can message people by an actual text message. What makes apps like Instagram different, is the fact that almost everyone my age is on Instagram, so you can message just about anyone if they have a public account. Instagram is simply equivalent to an online telephone directory, whereas just texting someone requires you to actually ask for someone’s number, and that’s alien to us now.

It’s unlikely that after reading this, anyone will be persuaded to delete social media, and after all, that isn’t my message, this week’s outage has made me realise how mindless I am to being controlled by a bigger system. If you are a frequent user of social media, gain something from it, some sort of inspiration, knowledge or accounts with positive affirmations. Wake up to liking pictures just because they’re on your feed, unfollow accounts that you don’t get anything from, or even worse, ones that make you feel bad about yourself or your body. Use your social media intuitively, see it as a minor accessory to your life rather than holding all your worth in something that doesn’t actually exist and that could literally crash and burn at any given moment, as we saw this week.

If you’re still unsure of why social media could be harmful, I’d recommend giving ‘The Social Dilemma’ a watch on Netflix, it uses a fictional tale, combined with actual facts and statistics to highlights the dangers of such platforms and I guarantee you will feel differently about every social media platform you use, but you will understand how to change this daunting feeling.