Facebook Outage Shows the Need for Greater Choice

The Executive Vice President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, commented Facebook outage on Twitter. She wrote that the incident showcased the need for greater choice in the tech market and reduced reliance on a few big players in the industry.

Vestager stated that alternatives and choice in technology were necessary, adding this was a specific aim of the Digital Markets Act. The act aims to impose stricter rules on digital platforms to ensure interoperability and ban discrimination in favour of own services. It would also result in big players being unable to take advantage of unfair behaviour.

Facebook acknowleged that the outage happened because of an error during routine maintenance on network of data centers. The error cause a collapse of its global system for more than six hours, leading to a torrent of problems that delayed the repairs, the company said.