What Monday’s Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram global downtime means to developers

A “German” wave hit the social media space Monday evening, affecting the big giants, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. It was a dreamy day at work when I was about signing out. I had booked a session to speak with my sweetheart before heading west to my house, so I pulled down the status bar on my phone to get my data running. This is a routine for me and shouldn’t keep me hanging… I waited for ten minutes, no message could kick the session sign to give a tick. No calls went through.

I smirked off the stud as I boarded the staff bus. “After all, network will start throttling as we move”. Minutes after minutes, 1 hour, 2, 3… Nothing! I couldn’t check my data balance as well, so I headed to Load2Earn to get some juice from my data wallet. I got loaded in 10 seconds and got frustrated when no data throttling was observed.

What’s in for me bro? But Opera was working… I could check emails and flutter! I reached out to William… “Hey bro, any throttling?” Nop! My pal reports same issue from SA, I think it’s global. My sweetheart sent in same report.

So what’s in for a world that can be connected and disconnected by Mark?

I build websites, so I know this could have been a server downtime due to maintenance, misconfiguration or DDoS attack.

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What options came to mind?

Telegram.

That’s all I could think of. After moving from LinkedIn to banned Twitter, the white kite app was a perfect fit. But I see a great danger to boundless connection in this arrangement.

What’s in for a developer?

Build.

Nigeria needs a strong regional social base. China rocks on WeChat with over 2 billion monthly active users. Nigeria holds on to the obvious giants. I know NairaLand. I know NaijaPals. To Nigerians, these are all alternatives and not mainstream social media platforms.

I’m sure of building an experimental chat client as a separate section on my website (https://iborowilliam.org), though not earlier than two months from now.

Who is in for the change? Who has what it takes? Who sees what I see?

I write the basics; HTML, CSS, JS – a student of PHP. Bring your Java, bring your PHP, bring your JQuery and Node.js so we try something!

I’m active on WhatsApp; connect now!

May Africa keep thriving!

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