Six hours without Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram 'like lockdown in reverse'
The six hours without Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram due to an outage across the platforms was like "lockdown in reverse", a psychologist has said.
Dr Rebecca Semmens-Wheeler, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham City University, said Covid-19 had made people realise the value of human contact.
And it meant people could get away from social media and instead see people face-to-face – instead of messaging them as they had been doing during the lockdowns.
Dr Semmens-Wheeler said: "During the Covid-19 lockdowns, we realised the value of human contact. People suffered with their mental health, with many feeling isolated and becoming depressed and anxious.
"Now, post-lockdown, another source for connection was temporarily removed. This time, owing to an outage, we could see people face-to-face but we weren't able to connect with them via three of the world’s biggest social media and messaging apps.
"The six hours without Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was a bit like lockdown in reverse."
The expert said social media had generated a new set of mental health issues and the break would've been an "excellent thing" for some people – but more difficult to others.
She said: "The internet is full of articles about how to digitally detox, apps that measure our screen time and services to block us from certain websites and apps, which can help us to become more productive and improve our well-being.
"A growing body of research suggests that while social media can have its benefits, it is addictive to many and can also be a tenuous source of self-esteem. We get a dopamine hit when somebody likes our post. We get a sense of connection when we see that other people share our points of view.
"While having a break from social media can be an excellent thing for some people, this experience will have been a wrench for many, and is likely to have caused anxiety and discomfort for those people, especially without knowing how long this would last.
"Many people turned to other forms of social media, such as Twitter and Telegram, as evidenced by the latter application struggling to function as WhatsApp users looked for an alternative.
"There could have been benefits to the outage for those who did not experience anxiety. For example, they may have had to multitask less, and might have been able to focus on other tasks. We know that social media affects productivity and engaging in another task drastically impairs our performance and fatigues the brain - as it has to work hard to switch between tasks."
Facebook revealed on Monday evening that the outages across its platforms were caused by configuration changes to its routers. A spokesman for the company said in a blog post: "Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations.
"We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."
