The unusual situation Facebook technicians experienced with the fall of WhatsApp | What is the technological cascade effect?

The fall of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was experienced as a chaotic day by millions of people around the world, unable to communicate through the usual channels. To general chaos, the company’s specialists had to add an additional difficulty, since the failure made them unable to access the equipment they had to reconfigure. There were moments of bewilderment.

Facebook, explained Fernando Schapachnik, executive director of the Sadosky Foundation, “is used as an identity provider by many other websites and applications “; that is,” instead of logging into any website, instead of putting your username and password, this authentication is done by taking Facebook data “.

For this reason, the fall recorded on October 4 generated a waterfall effect. “A touch of color, tragicomic, which is part of the anecdote although it does not address the underlying problem is that their own failure in the system prevented access control systems from functioning“Schapachnik said.

It meant that The Facebook experts themselves “had been logged out of the computers they had to reconfigure and at the same time, they could not physically access these computers because when they tried to enter with their credentials, the system failed because it could not connect to the central server “added.

Dependence in various fields

This difficulty testified to the “Dependency” which “has been generated by these services in various fields, the level of involvement of entrepreneurs, traders, people who depend on this company for their communications, ”said Beatriz Busaniche, president of the Vía Libre Foundation.

For the specialist, “it revealed the terrible idea that is to use this type of platform services for other relationships like those with states, with prepaid drug companies and so many other companies that use today ‘ hui the ‘log in’ of Facebook or Google to identify their online customers.

It would also be appropriate to ask how the fall of WhatsApp can be apprehended in relation to other more open services. “The comparison with the mail is interesting which is designed as the essence of standardized Internet protocols, as a form of federated access, where there is no single email provider, there are a lot of vendors interacting with each other because there is a clear set of rules, ”Schapachnik said.

“It’s like it’s a recipe for baking a cake and anyone can bake whatever cake they want. I can receive an email from Gmail and send it from Hotmail; I can have an email that my employer or the state gives me, they all interact with each other. With messaging platforms this situation is not given “, complete.

To analyze what happened, the specialist argued that the distinction is essential, on the one hand, “between an application that defines its own protocol, implements it by itself and no one else can. to do ”and, on the other hand,“ a system like that of the mail or that of the web pages, which is full of public and private providers, and in which there is everything, everyone can participate, compete or collaborate ”.

“It is a difficult and profound subject to understand; this is not a discussion reserved for technologists only. Understanding that today, in order to see ourselves as informed people, it is necessary to understand technology, is one of the steps that we must take as a society“Schapachnik concluded.