Facebook and related services such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus have been down for several hours in the last 24 hours.

Where pointed out The social media giant has led to networking-level problems behind widespread global outages.

Reports suggest the outages were related to DNS issues, with cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs writing that DNS records were pulled from global routing tables.

Other reports indicated that Facebook tried to restart servers manually, and that employees were unable to do so due to widespread outages.

After that, services began to return normally.

According to The Verge, the outage took about 5 hours before global access to all Facebook services was restored.

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This outage is one of the worst Facebook outages to date, affecting 2.89 billion global users of the social network, in addition to those who use related services.

In 2019, Facebook’s outage exceeded 14 hours, while the outage in 2008, when the platform had only 150 million users, lasted about a day.

For advocates of blockchain and decentralized networks, the outage from Facebook and other social platforms is the latest notable example of how centralized systems can fail on a large scale.

Blockchain offers successful alternatives to such centralized models, with user-managed distributed networks that are less likely to fail and resistant to operational censorship.

Blockchain builders, bitcoin enthusiasts and decentralization advocates seized the opportunity to spur Facebook and other centralized systems, or “Web 2.0,” via Twitter, which has been operating normally amid Facebook’s troubles, and via emailed data.

Matthew Gould, founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains, told via email:

Today’s total collapse of Facebook and Instagram, among other apps, illustrates the problems of centralization.

Everyone should mention why we need a more open, decentralized and inclusive Internet, free of turmoil and with strong defenses.

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Many Bitcoin fans have enjoyed realizing that the leading cryptocurrency currently has more market capitalization than Facebook, given the low price of Facebook shares.

Bitcoin’s market cap is around $929 billion as of this writing, while Facebook’s cap is just under $919 billion, with Facebook’s stock price down nearly 16% in the last 24 hours.

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