I don’t think this is a serious threat to Facebook in its current form. However, with its plans for expansion from anywhere like the metaverse to smart glasses to Facebook pay, the reputational damage and increasing lack of trust might present a significant roadblock to such ambitions, especially coupled with its history of sketchy data use. And now with the outage – imagine most of your online life depends on Facebook’s functionality, say, in its VR space, and that just switches off for an unspecified amount of time!
Several of my friends downloaded Telegram after the outage (whose user base increased by 25% in less than a year to over 500 million, not least due to WhatsApp-related concerns mentioned by Xenia). The platform undoubtedly has some blatant criminal activity and cyber security issues that may warrant attention from regulators, but seems to be a popular alternative.
Certainly an interesting landscape to watch.
