<story><title>The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let&apos;s make it longer next time</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/11/facebook_opinion_column/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewDucker</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a big deal when Facebook goes down.  This is why: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stonekettle.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;recap-october-4-2021.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stonekettle.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;recap-october-4-2021.htm...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;People want to talk to their friends.  They want to keep up with what their friends are up to.  Sometimes they want to do that in ways that you, specifically, aren&amp;#x27;t a fan of, but that&amp;#x27;s fine - different people are different.  But they want a place they can go and see &amp;quot;Oh, Dave had a kid.  Oh, Agnes got a promotion.  Oh, Cameron went to that new pizza place and it looks really tasty!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This means that either we design something decentralised that&amp;#x27;s as easy as Facebook to get onto use, or we&amp;#x27;re going to just end up replacing Facebook with something with essentially all of the same characteristics as Facebook.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s that or regulate it.  In many many different ways across many different countries.  That won&amp;#x27;t be much fun either!</text></comment>
<story><title>The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let&apos;s make it longer next time</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/11/facebook_opinion_column/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rocketpastsix</author><text>One thing that the outage really highlighted for me is how much small and medium size businesses rely on Facebook. That 6 hour outage costs somewhere into the billions of dollars lost for SMBs. If there was ever a time to highlight the need for a stand alone website, the great Facebook outage of 2021 is it.&lt;p&gt;Own your content, so the next time this happens, you aren&amp;#x27;t up a creek without a paddle.</text></comment>