



Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have long been more than just a way to chat and share photos. The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life. Today was a big reminder: Technologies are tools, not solutions.” “But that might not have been the case for hundreds of other hotlines around the world. “Because we have a field team, we were able to mitigate some of the more serious risks today’s outage presented,” said Alex Berryhill, the director of digital operations for the group, Cosas de Mujeres. And in Colombia, a nonprofit organization that uses WhatsApp to connect victims of gender-based violence to lifesaving services found its work impaired. In Turkey and Kenya, shopkeepers couldn’t sell their wares. In Mexico, politicians were cut off from their constituents. For more than five hours on Monday, the world got a taste of life without Facebook and its apps.
