The fall of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are you entitled to compensation for your failures in the service?

What do you do if you buy a shirt and you realize that it is stained ?, Or if the supermarket is selling you oranges in poor condition? Or if you buy a plane ticket and cancel your flight and that is the fault of the airline?

You will require that they give you another shirt, other oranges and you board another flight.

So, why when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp fail, we do not usually claim?

On Wednesday, the world's largest social network, with nearly 2.3 billion users, suffered the worst service failure in its history. Instagram and WhatsApp, which belong to Facebook, also had problems.

In less than 14 hours, users in different countries had difficulty sending messages, sharing content, or posting comments.

In other words, the service worked in a faulty way and did not conform to what it offers users.

On Thursday only, the platform announced that it had solved the problems and that their systems were recovering.

Is it possible to require compensation for hours for which we could not use platforms in which we rely on a large part of our communications?

Facebook's terms

The answer to this question depends on several factors, such as the legislation of each country or type of claim, but some general concepts give us clues about the success of such a claim.

The most important thing to understand is that if you have an account on Facebook, it is because you have accepted the conditions stipulated by the network, although this clearly indicates that you can receive legal recourse from your users.

"Facebook has certain conditions, you take them or leave them," Colombian lawyer Heidy Balanta, a specialist in computer law, told BBC Mundo.

Although Balanta also warns that it is not something that is "written on stone" because if a judge considers these terms as illegal or abusive, he could provide something else.

You probably did not read it, but when you created your account, you accepted a Facebook clause stating: "Our products are provided as is and we can not guarantee that they will always be safe , that they will never have errors or that they will work without interruption, delay or imperfection ".

They also say that they will in no way be liable for loss of income, information or other types of damages.

This means, in principle, that the platform does not have to deal with failures like those of Wednesday and that, therefore, you will get nothing by claiming compensation.

"In the United States, I think it's very likely that a court will apply that term," Jim Bunda, an expert in Internet law and regulation at Northwestern University, told BBC Mundo. . "That is, it would impose the limitation of Facebook's liability."

In Latin America, the situation would have a similar result, according to Balanta.

"Our legislation and our judges have virtually no effectiveness against these internet giants," said the lawyer.

According to Balanta, in cases where a company or company pays money to Facebook for advertising or services such as Workplace, the Facebook platform working as a team, it might have more than 39 options to claim compensation, but it would be necessary to show what type of damage was caused by failures of the social network.

"In the case of a physical person, I see this more complex," he says.

Juan Carlos Lara, lawyer of the Chilean organization Derechos Digitales, thinks the same way.

According to him, the user should show that he was losing valuable information or something important in his personal or professional life due to failures.

"I do not exclude that, but it would be very difficult to think of something like that," Lara told BBC Mundo.

That is, the inability to communicate with a family member on WhatsApp, the inability to post a message on Facebook or receive messages from customers buying products via Instagram, would not be a sufficient argument to obtain compensation.

The price of Facebook

But why does an ordinary user who pays nothing to Facebook think that he has the right to complain when the platform is not working well?

Someone might say that even if we do not pay with money, the platform takes advantage of the data we provide whenever we use them.

Although, in a way, this may be true, according to the experts, it is not enough to claim compensation as we would if we were intoxicated by the food at the restaurant.

"Since there has been no disbursement of money, there is in principle no right to compensation," Lara said.

Balanta agrees, explaining that Facebook's business model does not rely on people paying for benefits or choosing how they want their data to be processed.

Another thing is when Facebook is accused of using user information in a different way than expected, as in the case of Cambridge Analytica.

The future

In this scenario, there is not much to do, but it is not always the case. Lara explains that while she considers it very difficult, companies like Facebook are beginning to give the impression of giving back to their users because of system failures.

This idea is based on the fact that the activities of these companies are based on the use of user information.

"We have not reached the point of seeing this compensation today," Lara said. "But it is understandable that there is pressure in this direction," he adds.

"Maybe we can not put a price on that as a plate of food, but we deserve compensation for the mbadive use of this data."

For the lawyer, it is normal for companies to be relieved of responsibility for what is happening with their services, but in this case it is a company with a large number of companies. 39 users and having a significant influence on public life.

"This is changing the rules in which we believe that the responsibility of private enterprise has changed," said Lara.

For the moment, beyond legal discussions, for Lara, Wednesday's failures leave a more general lesson.

"We can not leave all our life in charge of a single supplier far from us, on servers that probably do not even know where they are," he said.

"We need to find different ways to communicate with those who matter to us."