Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are giants in the fields of social media and instant messaging. All the three giants experienced outages on April 14, 2019 that had brought down their systems for more than two hours. One of the main issues with many of the online services that are used today is that they run on centralized servers. The tech giants stockpile the user’s data on their activities in massive warehouses. Without the big servers, all of the online services and websites today will not be able to run.
This is one of the big reasons that they often fall victim to outage. Once a centralized server fails, the entire system fails, until it is properly repaired. Talking about Facebook, an outage also means downtime for WhatsApp as well as Instagram users. This is a crucial liability as a single point of failure can potentially shut down three of the most-used social media services.
The good thing is that we do not need to look for alternatives to centralized servers like Facebook.It is actually right under our noses and is called as Bitcoin. One of the Twitter users humorously Tweeted, “Bitcoin never suffered a worldwide outage!” The statement might be funny but it does got a point. Bitcoin has been constantly running since it was first released more than ten years back. It has gone through a complete price collapse twice, media cycles, hash wars, hard forks and all kinds of inner disputes.
Such controversy would likely kill any kind of centralized project from the get-go. However, Bitcoin has never stopped and has continued to run non stop ever since Satoshi Nakamoti mined the first block. This is an achievement that no other centralized server can even hold. At the same time Block-chain based networks like Bitcoin cannot handle the complexity that Facebook currently serves. It is surely an example that decentralized systems are self-regulating and self-functioning.
Photo Credits: 9to5 mac
