Experts reveal the real reason behind Meta's constant outages and say they expect things to get even worse.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, Gettyimages
Since the beginning of the year, Meta services have already suffered 33 outages, including two of the largest since 2022. These are not malicious hacker attacks, but something even more serious for the company, reports the DailyMail.
Technology experts revealed that Meta most likely created a system that is now too complex to continue to operate, especially as the firm continues to cut staff. Worryingly, one of the experts warned that the problems will get worse.
Meta's problem, as cyber security expert Dr. Junade Ali stated, is what he called “technical debt.” This basically means that big tech companies like Meta have built very complex parts of the internet based on old fashioned systems that don't really work. “What happens is that there are these 'legacy systems' that people don't have time to fix,” he said.
As Meta grew and swallowed up services like Instagram and Whatsapp, it had to make more things work based on these older systems, which communicate with each other through what's called an API, or Application Programming Interface. of application programming). They allow the complex system to function as a whole, but if something goes wrong in one API, the consequences can quickly spread to many other services.
This means that problems with routine updates and new features can trigger cascading effects that lead to disruptions large enough for users to notice.
On March 5 and April 3 this year, Meta services including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all went down for about two hours. The issue appears to have spread widely across all Meta services, affecting users of Threads and even users of the Meta Quest VR headset.
At the time, Meta admitted it was experiencing a “technical issue”.
Although these outages were billed as “server outages”, Meta's servers never went down and the site remained up and running throughout. Angelique Medina, head of internet intelligence at Cisco Thousand Eyes, said it's possible that the Meta developers actually released an update that interacted poorly with the rest of the infrastructure.
While these two outages were the most noticeable, they were far from the only times Meta experienced service outages this year. Experts say that, in fact, Meta service outages appear to be getting worse over time. There were 33 cases of “decreased performance” between January 1 and April 5.
More worryingly, some experts are not at all optimistic about improving these systems in the future. Cybersecurity expert James Bore said, for example, that he expects these issues to become common for Meta.
“They're not going to get better, it's never going to be better than it is now. The meta will continue to grow out of control and continue to break down and become more fragile with more failures… People will lose confidence and eventually I suspect it will just disappear”he stated.
Things are getting worse faster, experts said, as Meta tries to cut staff costs. In May of last year, Meta laid off more than 10,000 employees, on top of the 11,000 previously laid off in November 2022, losing about 10% of its total staff each time.
