Huge increase recorded: Facebook disruption caused SMS to boom

Given the serious failures of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the moment did not come only for competitor Twitter. SMS that has gone somewhat out of fashion has seen a revival, albeit briefly.

Since Facebook itself and the group’s WhatsApp and Instagram services, did not work for hours on Monday due to a technical problem, mobile phone users in Germany sent significantly more SMS. Deutsche Telekom said the number of such short messages increased eightfold in the turbulent period on Monday compared to other days.

At Telefónica and Vodafone it almost tripled – at Telefónica based on the break and Vodafone for the whole day compared to normal days.

680,000 hours of phone calls

The second effect of the Facebook failure: There were significantly more calls. At Telefónica (O2), mobile phone calls were made on Mondays between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM, for a total of 680,000 hours. If you look at the same period from the previous days, the average here was about 500,000 hours: an increase of 36 percent.

In contrast, there were no significant changes among network operators in terms of the amount of data played over the cellular network. This was due to the fact that requests to speak and upload photos in chats or in social services are not so important compared to video broadcasts. These services were available.

Facebook’s problems also had consequences for German mobile operators. Telekom’s hotline received twice as many calls as usual during the outage.

Billions of users affected

A total of six hours, extraordinarily long, hit billions of Facebook’s online network users and daughters on Monday. Facebook explained this with its buggy configuration app. As a result, data traffic between data centers has collapsed.

The malfunction was so difficult to control that, according to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers. This is similar to a computer at home, where you have to press the reset button because nothing works anymore.