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Comment by ferdowsi | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. The theoretical fat-fingering SRE who stopped all access to FB has probably done more to benefit humanity than any other single engineer in recent memory.

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Many pockets of humanity are materially worse off today because of these outages. The (perhaps sad) reality is that tens of thousands of small businesses are completely dependent on WhatsApp and Instagram, especially in developing countries. This outage will cause lots of lost business by people who don't have massive cash reserves to ride out the lost revenue, unlike Facebook itself.

If it helps them break free of the facebook ecosystem/tax authority it could still be good even if expensive in the short-term.

Businesses which rely on Facebook, as their sole distribution channel could get out of business if Facebook goes out. A lot of economical value will be lost.

Allowing copyrights to expire on pre-1950 creative works would also destroy billions of dollars of "economic value", but that doesn't mean it would be bad for humanity.

We should be careful to not take our values from a spreadsheet.

Maybe they should not have a single point of failure. FAANG is not good for our economy’s resilience.

Many of these businesses are small single-person operations with little tech understanding that are using, for example, FB marketplace. They wouldn't even know what you meant by "single point of failure."

How about “putting all your eggs in one basket”?

If this is the event that teaches someone that Facebook is not the Internet, that’s a benefit to us all.

Sad!

Would these be the same developing countries where Facebook has helped facilitate genocide?

Seriously though, is the net utility of Facebook even positive there? It’s not like those businesses couldn’t interact with their customers over literally any other medium.

Those businesses should have never depended on Facebook to begin with, if anything the fact that what you describe is a reality is a testimony of the degree at which Facebook is a cancer to be expunged.

Even if we accept that's true, it still makes no difference to the fact that this outage has harmed those people.

Network effect, so businesses have no one else to depend on.

Jesus man! We’ve lockdown some business for months, they are back, they found alternatives like delivery and you’re telling me that one day without WhatsApp or Facebook is going to be a tragedy?

They should get a raise!

And some kind of Medal of Honor.

Can we nominate them for a Nobel Peace Prize?

If they get fired we may be looking at a GoFundMe situation.

Some of us use these services to communicate with our friends.

The poor guy though - he made Zuck blink. And when Zuck blinks, people die!!!

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